Background

Adams was born on March 11, 1952 in Cambridge, England; the son of Janet (née Donovan) and Christopher Douglas Adams. A few months after his birth, the family moved to the East End of London. His parents divorced in 1957; Douglas, Susan, his younger sister, and their mother moved to Brentwood, Essex.

Education

Adams attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. At nine, he passed the entrance exam for Brentwood School. He attended the prep school from 1959 to 1964, then the main school until December 1970. Intelligent and creative from an early age, he started writing when he was in school. He received much encouragement from his teacher Frank Halford who greatly appreciated the boy’s writing skills.

A good student, Adams was awarded a scholarship in English at St John's College, Cambridge. He first earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1974 and later gained a Master’s degree in English literature. During his time at the university he wrote comedy sketches for the performing arts society.

Career

After leaving university, Adams began to write for radio and television. He became acquainted with Graham Chapman of the comedy group Monty Python, and the two formed a writing partnership. The collaboration, however, was a brief one. To make ends meet Adams had to take up a series of odd jobs, including as a hospital porter, barn builder, and chicken shed cleaner. He was employed as a bodyguard by a Qatari family, who had made their fortune in oil. He continued writing in his leisure time without much success.

In 1976, however, his career escalated a little when he wrote and performed ‘Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close’ in a festival. But by the end of the year, he was in strife again. Slowly he learned to cope with his situation and decided to keep working hard for success. His early works include ‘The Burkiss Way’ (1977) and ‘The News Huddlines’.

In 1977 he co-wrote with Chapman an episode of ‘Doctor on the Go’, a sequel to the ‘Doctor in the House’ television comedy series. Thus, during 1978–1980 he was script editor for the science fiction series Doctor Who and wrote several episodes of the cult show.

During this time he came up with the idea of a radio series called ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’. The series was based on a concept that had originated in Adams’ mind years ago while he was hitchhiking in Europe. The radio series was first broadcast weekly by BBC Radio 4 in the UK in March and April 1978. It proved to be a big success.

The success of the radio series prompted him to write a series of novels based on the same theme. The first of five novels in ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ comedy science fiction was published in 1979. It sold 250,000 copies in the first three months. He also wrote a fictional guide book of the same name for hitchhikers.

Four other books in the series, deliberately misnamed ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ "Trilogy", were published in the years to come: ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ (1980), ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ (1982), ‘So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish’ (1984) and ‘Mostly Harmless’ (1992). The Hitchhiker novels also spawned a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts in 1981.

Douglas Adams also published other novels including ‘Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency’ (1987), a humorous detective novel which was followed by a sequel ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’ in 1988. Years later, A BBC radio adaptation, ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’, starring Harry Enfield and Stephen Moore, was broadcast on October 2008.

Achievements

• Douglas Adams is best known as the creator of ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’ series which originated as a BBC radio comedy in 1978 before spawning a series of five highly successful books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. A television series, several stage plays, comics and a video game also developed from the series. The novel also peaked at No. 1 on the ‘Sunday Times’ best seller list (1979) and earned the author the "Golden Pan" award (From his publishers for reaching the 1,000,000th book sold) in 1984. It was also at the 24th number in the Waterstone’s Books and Channel list of the 100 greatest books of the century.
  
  His other awards include the ‘Imperial Tobacco Award’ (1978), Sony Award (1979) and ‘Best Program for Young People’ Society of Authors/Pye Awards for Radio (1980). In 1982, three of Adams books made it to the New York Times bestseller list and the Publishers’ Weekly bestseller list making him the first British author to achieve this target after Ian Fleming.
  
  Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

    (Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, str...)

    1984
  • The Salmon of Doubt

    (Culled posthumously from Adams’s fleet of beloved Macinto...)

    2002
  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

    (Join the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his uncommo...)

    1980
  • The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

    (Kate Schechter would like to know why everyone she meets ...)

    1988
  • Last Chance to See

    (New York Times bestselling author Douglas Adams and zoolo...)

    1990
  • Life, the Universe, and Everything

    (The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of loo...)

    1982
  • The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet--But There Ought to Be

    (A rollicking, thought-provoking dictionary for the modern...)

  • Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

    (The Doctor promised Romana the end of the universe, so sh...)

  • Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

    (A wildly inventive novel of ghosts, time travel, and one ...)

    1987
  • The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Five Novels in One Outrageous Volume

    (In one complete volume, here are the five classic novels ...)

  • Mostly Harmless

    (Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enj...)

    1992
  • The Dirk Gently Omnibus 2001

Religion

Adams described himself as a "radical atheist. He remained fascinated by religion because of its effect on human affairs.

Views

In 1985, Adams took an assignment to travel to various locations around the world in the company of a zoologist, documenting a search for specimens of the world's most endangered species. This resulted in both the radio series and the nonfiction book Last Chance to See (1990). Although the book was not as commercially successful as his novels, Adams referred to the book as one of the most rewarding projects on which he had ever worked. This reflects a common theme in Adams's work regarding the double-edged sword of technology, which can provide great advancements for humanity but also lead to destruction of the natural world.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Adams flirted with such big philosophical questions as the meaning of life, the search for absolute answers in a relativistic world, and the potentiality of new technologies. He consistently set up these issues as serious problems but rarely followed through with any rigor. While the jokiness of the first radio series and novel had an engaging charm, in subsequent volumes this tone was too insubstantial to carry the philosophical weight Adams suggested. Adams intelligently set up the real problems faced by contemporary British society, but rather than seriously pursue them, he chose to evade them with archness and witty dismissiveness. Indeed, the quest for answers and philosophical enlightenment is portrayed throughout the series as somewhat futile. Adrift in an alien and alienated galaxy, Arthur and Ford Prefect's most pressing question is, “Where shall we have dinner?” and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is enough of an answer for them.

Quotations: "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place."

"I am terribly proud of—I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA! "

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Many races believe it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure."

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

"Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

“I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas . . . cultures . . . and systems of thought we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word freedom means than I see much evidence of in America. To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that in Europe we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.”

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

“For years I wanted to be John Cleese, I was most disapointed when I found out the job had been taken.”

“A danger one runs is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks 'oh well we can do silly voices and silly walks and so on', and I think that's exactly the wrong way to do it.”

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

“Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.”

“Cyberspace is - or can be - a good, friendly and egalitarian place to meet.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”

Personality

Douglas Adams was left-handed and had a large collection of left-handed guitars. He was a big fan of the progressive rock band Pink Floyd and a friend of the guitarist David Gilmour. He was also huge fan of The Beatles and referenced them constantly in his work.

The author was well-known for his love of technology, especially products by Apple. For example, he owned the first two Apple Macintosh computers sold in the UK; was heavily involved in the development of first-person computer games (such as the computer version of "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy", "Bureaucracy" and "Starship Titanic"); and was an early adopter of the Internet.

It is said that Adams was a notorious procrastinator and his editors once had to lock him inside of a hotel room to get him to finish a book.

Interests

• environmentalism, music, fast cars, cameras, technological innovation

• Writers

  Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ruth Rendell, Robert Sheckley, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse

• Music & Bands

  Pink Floyd, The Beatles

Connections

Douglas Adams had an affair with married novelist Sally Emerson in the early 1980s which ended when Sally returned to her husband.

On November 24, 1991, Adams married Jane Belson and they have a daughter by the name Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on June 22, 1994. They lived in Islington, but in 1999 they moved to California, United States, where they lived until his death. Following the funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London. Jane died on September 7, 2011.

Father:

Christopher Douglas Adams

(1927–1985)

Mother:

Janet (Donovan) Adams

(1927–2016)

Sister:

Susan Adams

Wife:

Jane Belson

Jane Belson was born as Jane Elizabeth Belson. She is known for her work on Venice Beach in the Sixties: A Celebration of Creativity (2008). She died on September 7, 2011 in London, England.

Daughter:

Polly Jane Rocket Adams

Polly Jane Rocket Adams was born on June 22, 1994 in London, England as Polly Adams. She is an actress, known for Rockstar (2000).

References

• Wish You Were Here In Wish You Were Here, Nick Webb, a longtime friend of the author, reveals the many sides, quirks, and contradictions of Douglas Adams. A summation as celebration, it is a look back at a life well worth the vicarious reliving, as studded with anecdote, droll comic incident, and heartfelt insight as its subject’s own unforgettable tales of cosmic wanderlust.
  2003
• The Frood The Frood tells the story of Adams' explosive but agonizingly constructed fictional universe, from his initial inspirations to the posthumous sequel(s) and adaptations, bringing together a thousand tales of life as part of the British Comedy movements of the late 1970s and 1980s along the way.
  2014
• Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams M.J. Simpson has produced a rich, revealing chronicle of one of the most wildly creative minds of our time.
  2003
• Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy In Don’t Panic, Gaiman celebrates everything Hitchhiker: the original radio play, the books, comics, video and computer games, films, television series, record albums, stage musicals, one-man shows, the Great One himself, and towels.
  1988