[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by jallanite

I would agree that Tolkien is “the father of the modern genre” in that his writing vastly increased the amount of fantasy published. But that was mainly in creating a market for similar works to his, into which works which were not very similar could also be fitted by book sellers. But there remains much fantasy published that has little of note connecting it to Tolkien’s work. For example the works of Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, arguably the two most popular of obviously non-Tolkien fantasists.

First off, I wouldn't exactly consider King a "fantasy" writer primarily, though he does dabble in it, perhaps.
Second, at least the Dark Tower series owes a serious debt to Tolkien. In King's Introduction to the revised edition of The Gunslinger, he says:

The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, and The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, are just two of many), were born out of Tolkien's.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Before Tolkien published The Hobbit there were James Branch Cabell, William Hope Hodgson, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber (barely), Eric Rücker Eddison, Lewis Carol, Charles E. Caryl, John Ruskin, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie, Edith Nesbit, Carlo Collodi, Beatrix Potter, Felix Salten, A. A. Milne, Hugh Lofting, Walter R. Brooks, P. L. Travers, and L. Frank Baum to name only those writers I can think of at the moment that I have not already mentioned in this post and whose fantasy writing is still widely read.

It's a quibbling detail, but are Lovecraft and Poe "fantasy" authors too? I'd always consigned at least Lovecraft to the Horror genre.