- "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
- — Adam's gravestone
Richard George Adams was the author of several novels, including Watership Down and Tales from Watership Down. He also wrote many other novels, including Shardik, The Girl in the Swing, and The Plague Dogs, the latter two also being adapted into their own films. After the success of Watership Down, Adams became a full-time author.
Adams passed away on 24 December 2016 at the age of 96. His death was announced by his daughter.
Biography[]
Adams was born in Berkshire in 1920 and studied history at Bradfield and Worcester College, Oxford. He served in the Second World War and in 1948 joined the Civil Service. In the mix-sixties he completed his first novel, Watership Down, the story of which he originally told to his children to while away a long car journey. Watership Down was awarded both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian award for children’s fiction for 1972.
In 1974 he retired from the Civil Service to devote himself to writing, and in that year he published Shardik, his second novel. His subsequent novels are The Plague Dogs (1977), The Girl in a Swing (1980), Maia (1984) and Traveller (1988), and his other books include The Iron Wolf and Other Stories, The Bureaucats, A Nature Diary, Voyage through the Antarctic (in collaboration with Ronald Lockley) and Tales from Watership Down, a companion volume that is also published by Penguin. He collaborated on Nature through the Seasons and Nature Day and Night (with Max Hooper and David A. Goddard). He wrote the poetry for The Tyger Voyage, illustrated by Nicola Bayley, and The Ship’s Cat, illustrated by Alan Aldridge, and edited an anthology of modern poetry entitled Occasional Poets. He has also written a volume of autobiography, The Day Gone By.
Richard Adams lived in the south of England with his wife Elizabeth, who is an expert on English ceramic history, and has two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond. His enthusiasms are English literature, music, chess, beer and shove-ha’penny, bird-song, folk-song and country walking.
Activism[]
Adams was a lifelong defender of animal rights, dating back to his own childhood, when he saw a man pushing a cart loaded with dead rabbits down a street. “It made me realise, in an instant, that rabbits were [viewed as] things and that it was only in a baby’s world that they were not,” he said. He was among the first people to speak out against the annual Canadian seal slaughter, taking part in an anti-hunt lecture tour in Canada in 1977, and was an ardent foe of the fur industry in general, calling it “a major evil for the Western world.” He explained, “When you meditate upon what [animals] suffer, it is enough to drive you mad. It does not bear thinking about.”
Adams served as president of the U.K.’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for a short time in the ’80s before resigning in protest because he felt that the organization wasn’t focusing enough on campaigning for animal protection.
His best-selling novel The Plague Dogs took an unblinking look at the questionable ethics of animal experimentation. The book, which describes experiments on dogs in heartbreaking detail, “was deliberately set up to satirize animal experimentation as well as government and tabloid press,” he said, admitting that he made no effort to disguise his indignation over the torture of animals in laboratories.
“These experimental animals are just sentient objects; they’re useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they are able to feel fear and pain,” he wrote. “And they’re used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes down to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights, and no choice in the matter.”
In 2011, Adams joined a number of politicians, scientists, and celebrities—including Jane Goodall, Ricky Gervais, and Queen guitarist Brian May—in urging then–Prime Minister David Cameron to halt the importation of wild-caught primates and their offspring for abuse in experiments, citing the immense suffering that the animals endure.
The petition was part of a global initiative to halt experiments on our primate cousins. Shortly afterward, the U.S. government suspended funding of experiments on chimpanzees and later agreed to retire all chimpanzees held in government laboratories to sanctuaries. “It’s time people started thinking of Man as one of a number of species inhabiting the planet; and if he’s the cleverest, that merely gives him more responsibility for seeing that the rest can lead proper, natural lives,” Adams wrote in The Plague Dogs.
Autobiography[]
Coming soon!
Gallery[]
Main page: Richard Adams/Image Gallery
Interviews[]
Main page: Richard Adams/Interviews/Image Gallery
Websites[]
Trivia[]
- His favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry.
- His personal favorite book he written was Shardik.
- He was buried in Whitechurch Cemetery.
Etymology[]
- The name "Richard" is from European origin. The name roughly translates to "mighty ruler."