Books like The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends

Overall, it’s worth reading if you are studying Lewis. He does talk about the other men (for example, there were also some interesting details about Warnie and John Wain that I hadn’t seen before). But it’s half an Inklings discussion, and half a biography of C. S. Lewis. The author admits this early on, and I was prepared for it. But there’s certainly room for more detailed scholarship on the Inklings, as this book left open quite a few gaps. For Lewis and Williams, it’s a treasure. If I were studying Tolkien or any of the other Inklings, I would be disappointed in the lack of detail about any of the other men.First there’s small bios of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. Then in the middle there’s a description of a foe Inklings meeting, in that the author puts together a sample of what he thinks an Inklings meeting could have been like (based on what he knows these men talked about), but it didn’t actually happen. We’ll never know exactly what these men said, as there’s no real transcripts. This pretend conversation was quite good, in that it felt authentic and contained a lot of interesting content.I was a little confused by how often Carpenter turned back to Charles Williams after that, as if the man were a mystery he wanted to unpack. Later in the book he does seem to re-center his writing, and there are details on the developing careers of each of the main thee men, and how this changed the dynamics between Inklings in later years. As one would expect, Owen Barfield, Neville Coghill, and Hugo Dyson all make appearances. But they are merely brushed over. They barely get their own paragraphs, much less their own chapters.Tolkien got the least amount of page time of the three. That’s likely because of Carpenter's separate biography of Tolkien: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, which I enjoyed reading some years ago.Originally published in 1978, this book seems to be the first and foundational work on Inklings studies. I bet that all other Inklings-type books sprouted from this one. I would be curious to see what further observations more recent scholars have come up with.Other books like this are:Published in 2007: The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, which seems to have been remade into Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings in 2015.Published in 2009: The Inklings of Oxford: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their FriendsPublished in 2015: The Oxford Inklings: Their Lives, Writings, Ideas, and InfluencePublished in 2015: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles WilliamsPublished in 2016: A Well of Wonder: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and The InklingsPublished in 2017: The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain