J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings began publication in three volumes in 1954.
The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in the United Kingdom on 29 July 1954 by George Allen & Unwin. The Two Towers followed on 11 November 1954, and The Return of the King appeared on 20 October 1955. Although the work is commonly described as a trilogy, Tolkien considered it one novel divided into six internal books plus appendices.
The three-volume format was partly a practical publishing decision. Postwar paper shortages and the size of the manuscript made a single-volume edition expensive and difficult to produce. The American edition was published by Houghton Mifflin, with the first volume appearing in 1954 and the other volumes following in 1955. A common mistake is to give 1955 as the publication year for the whole work; 1955 is the year the third volume appeared, while the series began in 1954.