[Lush]

I read The Lord of the Rings shortly after the first movie came out, and the reason then was chiefly peer-pressure. All the cool kids were doing it!

Anyway, I had a lot of time on my hands then, because I was a senior in high school and had recently gotten in to college, so I was no longer taking half of my classes seriously and found that I preferred Tolkien to math.

I don't know about his work being the most important piece of "imaginitive" literature written in the last hundred years, because the last hundred years also saw everything from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to Jose Saramago's Blindness, from Anatolii Zamyatin's We to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying being published.

Of course, if by "imaginitive" you don't mean "fiction" but "fantasy," I am thoroughly tempted to agree with you, though the jury is still out on JK Rowling's "importance" (the entertainment value of her work being undeniable). The same I would say for Phillip Pullman, though Pullman's ideology, perhaps, alienates the full impact of his work from the majority of his readers, and I can't say the same for Tolkien.

Tolkien, after all, manages to touch practically everyone that bears with him.