How Tolkien triumphed over the critics goes back and looks at how reviewers treated Tolkien’s now-beloved classic when it first came out:
The Spectator’s Richard Hughes, writing in October 1954, opened his review praising the pleasures of reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit — published 17 years earlier — to his children.‘This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,’ said the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, while American critic Edmund Wilson, dismissed the entire trilogy in 1956 as ‘juvenile trash’.
(Hat tip to Slashdot.)