The award-winning author of the definitive guide to slogging around in outer space, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, was born and raised in Cambridge, England. While studying English at St. John's College, Cambridge, Adams began to write, perform in, and direct stage plays. Through this experience he got a job as a script supervisor on the influential cult TV show, DR. WHO--Adams also said that he worked as everything from a chicken shed cleaner to a bodyguard. In 1978 he wrote what many st more...
The award-winning author of the definitive guide to slogging around in outer space, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, was born and raised in Cambridge, England. While studying English at St. John's College, Cambridge, Adams began to write, perform in, and direct stage plays. Through this experience he got a job as a script supervisor on the influential cult TV show, DR. WHO--Adams also said that he worked as everything from a chicken shed cleaner to a bodyguard. In 1978 he wrote what many still consider his best work, the science fictional satire that became the original BBC radio series, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE....The record album of that first series, as well as the second series, won awards from the British Science Fiction Association in 1979, 1980, and 1981. Following THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE... radio series, Adams adapted his scripts and produced the first novel of what was originally intended as a trilogy, though it eventually stretched to five novels and a short story. With the publication of the fourth book in the "trilogy," and with his subject matter becoming simultaneously more environmentally aware and much darker in tone, Adams arrived at two important themes of his later work--ecological concern and a more pervasive sense of pessimism. He explores the first theme in his non-fiction account--co-written with Mark Carwardine--of traveling to see the last surviving members of various endangered animal species around the world. The second theme, addressed in the Dirk Gently series, delved more fully into the defects of the human condition, although a sense of comedy remained. Adams returned to finish up the Hitchhiker trilogy with a final, fifth volume. Following that, Adams, a longtime fan of Macintosh computers, developed several CD-ROM games, based both on his own published novels and on original ideas--one of the latter, STARSHIP TITANIC, was novelized by Adams's friend, Monty Python co-founder Terry Jones. Adams married Jane Belson on November 25, 1991 and the couple had a daughter, Polly Jane--nicknamed "Rocket"--on June 22, 1994. He died of a heart attack on May 11, 2001, only two days after Asteroid 18610 (which had been discovered in 1998) was officially named Arthurdent, in honor of the main character in THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.less...
Wow! I never saw a photo of Douglas before, but have I loved his work for years, b4 the radio program, the TV show or the movie. I write this on my Mac Pro and I know that Douglas would approve. Huge respect, a genius of our age, cut off in his prime.