Short answers, pulled from the story.
J. R. R. Tolkien was an English writer and academic philologist, born on the 3rd of January 1892 and died on the 2nd of September 1973. He wrote the high fantasy works The Hobbit, published in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955. He is widely regarded as the father of modern fantasy literature.
From 1925 to 1945 Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College at Oxford. He then became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and a Fellow of Merton College, holding those posts from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.
Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt at the age of 16 when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house in Edgbaston where she lived. She was three years older than him. His guardian Father Morgan forbade contact until Tolkien turned 21, and on the evening of his 21st birthday he wrote asking her to marry him. They married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Warwick on the 22nd of March 1916.
Tolkien served as a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers and arrived at the Somme in early July 1916, taking part in assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. On the 27th of October 1916 he contracted trench fever and was invalided back to England on the 8th of November 1916. Several of his closest school friends, including Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith, were killed during the battle.
The great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence and the shaping of the modern fantasy genre. This caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the father of modern fantasy literature, more precisely of high fantasy. The scholar Tom Shippey described him as the author of the 20th century.
Christopher Tolkien, his father's literary executor, organised material into a single volume published as The Silmarillion in 1977, which won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978. He also published Unfinished Tales in 1980 and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth between 1983 and 1996, along with standalone works including The Children of Hurin in 2007 and The Fall of Gondolin in 2018.