Douglas Adams

British · 1952 to 2001

Born Douglas Noël Adams on March 11, 1952, in Cambridge, the son of a probation officer turned management consultant and a nurse who divorced when he was five, he grew up partly in an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood run by his maternal grandparents. He was six feet tall by the age of twelve and stopped growing at six foot five, a height that made school cripplingly self-conscious. At Brentwood School his form master Frank Halford awarded him ten out of ten for creative writing, a mark Adams would invoke for the rest of his life when facing writer's block. He read English at St John's College, Cambridge, joined the invitation-only comedy club Footlights, and graduated in 1974 with a 2:2. To make ends meet in London he worked as a bodyguard for a wealthy Arab family, guarding their hotel rooms through the night. His radio comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first aired on BBC Radio 4 in March 1978 and grew into five books that sold over fourteen million copies in his lifetime, a television series, a video game, a film, and a generation of readers who knew the answer was forty-two. He wrote three serials for Doctor Who and conceived the comic detective novels Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), both built on his theory of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. He called himself a radical atheist, championed conservation in Last Chance to See (1990), and adored the Apple Macintosh. He died on May 11, 2001, at the age of forty-nine, of a heart attack at a Santa Barbara gym, halfway through a book he never finished.