Phantastes (Adult fantasy)

Ballantine Books, 1970. Paperback. This novel was written in 1858, when the author was a teenager. It is an enormously influential early fantasy novel, influencing the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle and others. In this tale, the "fairy land" represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike, this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life's work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self.