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Douglas Adams
English author and humourist (1952–2001) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Douglas Noël Adams[a] (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy evolved into a "trilogy" of six[b] books which sold more than 14 million copies in his lifetime. It was made into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.[5]
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Adams wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990) and Last Chance to See (1990). He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, including the unaired serial Shada, co-wrote City of Death (1979), and served as script editor for its 17th season. He co-wrote the sketch "Patient Abuse" for the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A posthumous collection of his selected works, including the first publication of his final (unfinished) novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
Known for his sharp wit and habit of missing deadlines,[6][7] Adams called himself a "radical atheist" and was an advocate for environmentalism and conservation. He was a lover of music, fast cars,[8] technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh.
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Early life and education
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Family
Douglas Noël Adams was born in Cambridge on 11 March 1952 to Christopher Douglas Adams, a management consultant and computer salesman who formerly worked as a probation officer, and nurse Janet Dora Sydney Adams (née Donovan). He had Scottish, Irish and German ancestry. His paternal grandfather, born in Glasgow, came from a long line of distinguished doctors.[9][10]
Shortly after his birth, the family moved to the East End of London.[11] His sister Susan was born in March 1955.[9] By the time he was five his parents had divorced; Douglas, Susan and their mother subsequently moved to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood run by his maternal grandparents.[12] Each parent remarried, giving Adams several half-siblings.[13]
Education
Adams attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood.[14] He entered the prep school for Brentwood School in September 1959.[15] Adams felt isolated at school because of his large stature;[16] he was 6 feet (1.8 m) tall by the age of 12, and stopped growing at 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m).[14] His form master Frank Halford had a profound influence on him. Adams was the only student to be awarded 10/10 by Halford for creative writing – something Adams remembered for the rest of his life, particularly when facing writer's block.[17][18]
Some of his earliest writing was published at Brentwood School. His first published work was a brief report on the prep school's photography society in The Brentwoodian in September 1962.[19] In February 1965, he had a surreal short story titled Suspense published in the children's comic Eagle.[11][20] In early 2014, a poem written by Adams in January 1970 was discovered in a school cupboard.[21] He became a boarder at the school in September 1964,[14] and eventually left in December 1970.[22]
On the strength of a religious poetry essay that discussed the Beatles and William Blake,[14] Adams was awarded an exhibition to study English at St John's College, Cambridge, where his father had studied.[23] He entered the university in 1971,[14] hoping to follow in the footsteps of comedy writer-performers like Monty Python's Flying Circus.[24] Adams desperately wanted to join Footlights, the invitation-only student comedy club, and was elected to the club in February 1972. However he was disappointed by its aloof culture. He began writing comedy sketches with fellow student Keith Jeffery, but this partnership ended in November 1972.[25] He subsequently wrote and performed in revues with students Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith; their troupe was called "Adams-Smith-Adams".[26][27] Although Adams-Smith-Adams' written material featured prominently in Footlights' 1974 May Week Revue (titled Chox), Douglas Adams was gutted when he was not cast on the basis that his performing abilities were not strong enough.[28] He graduated in 1974 with a 2:2 in English literature.[29] Many of Adams' Cambridge peers played important roles in his career, such as Jon Canter, John Lloyd and Simon Jones.[30][31]
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Career
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Writing
"Certainly when I was at Cambridge I wanted to be a writer-performer – I very much had the Pythons in my sights – that's why I wanted to do that kind of stuff. But for some reason the world wasn't that keen on me being a performer. And probably quite rightly."[32]
—Adams, April 2002
Adams moved back to London after leaving university, determined to break into TV and radio as a writer.[29] Chox was broadcast on television in 1974.[33] The Adams-Smith-Adams trio continued working together until late 1975.[34] Adams's career stalled; his writing style was unsuited to the current style of radio and TV comedy.[29] To make ends meet he took 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.[35] Adams continued to write and submit sketches, though few were accepted. In 1976, his career had a brief improvement when he wrote and performed Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. By Christmas, work had dried up again and a depressed Adams moved to live with his mother.[36] The lack of writing work hit him hard, and low confidence became a feature of Adams's life, "I have terrible periods of lack of confidence [...] I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it was like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather – you just have to get on with it".[37]
Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines.[38] He also wrote, again with Chapman, the 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to the Doctor in the House television comedy series. After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East.[39] He left after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.[citation needed]
In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote scripts for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles, "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes eight and twelve).[40] Lloyd and Adams also co-wrote the last two episodes of the first Hitchhiker's radio series ("Fit the Fifth" and "Fit the Sixth"),[7] as well as the humorous dictionary-style books The Meaning of Liff (1983) and The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990).[41][42]
Monty Python and Graham Chapman
Once he had established himself in Footlights, Adams quickly sought out his idol John Cleese of Monty Python, interviewing him for the student newspaper Varsity in November 1972. Adams later admitted "I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was taken".[43] Cleese quit Monty Python's Flying Circus in early 1974, leaving his writing partner Graham Chapman to search for a new collaborator. Chapman met Adams in July 1974 at the West End opening night party of Chox. The two formed an 18-month writing partnership, earning Adams a writing credit in Monty Python's fourth series for a sketch called "Patient Abuse".[44] Adams also contributed to the "Marilyn Monroe" sketch that appeared on The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Adams later stated that his contributions were "hardly worth mentioning". Nevertheless, he is one of only two non-Python members to receive a writing credit on a Monty Python project (the other is Neil Innes).[45]
Adams had two brief appearances in Monty Python's fourth series. At the beginning of episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War", Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to on-screen captions) pulling on gloves.[46][47] At the beginning of episode 43, "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile onto a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron...").[46][48] Jones was the Python member with whom Adams formed the closest friendship.[49][50]
Adams, Chapman and Bernard McKenna co-wrote a 1976 television pilot titled Out of the Trees, in which Adams cameod as a thug beating up an old lady. The pilot did not go to series. Adams was disappointed by the production, calling it "excellent in parts [but] also dreadful in parts".[51][52]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Adams became obsessed with combining the comedy and science fiction genres in a single project.[53] In 1977, he got that chance when producer Simon Brett encouraged him to pitch a comedy science fiction radio show to BBC Radio 4. Adams' initial idea was The Ends of the Earth, an anthology series where the Earth was destroyed in a different way each episode.[54][55] He started developing the pilot episode—in which Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route—and soon hit on the idea of a guidebook for space travellers. He abandoned the anthology approach in favour of a single narrative following the travels of ordinary Englishman Arthur Dent and his alien friend Ford Prefect.[56] Adams stated he first conceived of the title in 1971 while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that somebody should write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[57]
Adams developed the storyline episode-by-episode.[58] Facing time constraints, he turned to John Lloyd for help with the first series' final two episodes.[7][59] The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was innovative in its use of sound effects and music.[54] The first radio series was broadcast weekly in the UK from 8 March 1978.[60]
Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science fiction book of his own, called GiGax.[61] Very little of Lloyd's material survived in later Hitchhiker's Guide adaptations, such as the novels and the TV series. The TV series was based on the first six radio episodes, and sections contributed by Lloyd were largely re-written.[citation needed]
The series was distributed in the United States by National Public Radio. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21–25 January 1980.[citation needed]
While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams found difficulty in keeping to writing deadlines; the problem became worse as he proceeded to publish novels. He was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was completed.[7][62][50] Adams was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."[63] Adams wrote five novels in the series: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), 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).[64] He jokingly described them as a "trilogy". He had plans for a sixth book to conclude the series, noting that Mostly Harmless was "a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number."[65][66] After his death, his estate permitted Eoin Colfer to write a sixth and final book in the series, And Another Thing... (2009).[4] 14 million copies of Hitchhiker's Guide books had been sold worldwide by the time of Adams' death.[67]
The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo-illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four Hitchhiker's novels (the paperback for the fifth re-used the artwork from the hardback edition).[68] In 1981, the radio series was adapted into a BBC television miniseries.[69]
In 1980, Adams began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a film, making several trips to Los Angeles, and working with Hollywood studios and potential producers.[citation needed] He likened the film's development process to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it".[70][71] When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the film project started with Disney, which had bought the rights in 1998.[citation needed] A feature film adaptation, directed by Garth Jennings, was finally released in 2005. The screenplay is credited to Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick.[72]
Radio producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams, first in 1993, and later in 1997 and 2000 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series.[73] They also discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy". As with the film, this project was realised only after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and was subsequently released on audio CD. With the aid of a recording of his reading of Life, the Universe and Everything and editing, Adams can be heard playing the part of Agrajag posthumously. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in May and June 2005, and also subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author."[74]
Doctor Who
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Adams had dreamt of writing for the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who since his teens.[75] At prep school he wrote a spoof about Daleks being powered by Rice Krispies.[76] By 1976, he had submitted several story ideas to the Doctor Who production office which had been rejected, as well as a potential film idea, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen (the Krikkitmen storyline was eventually recycled in Life, the Universe and Everything).[77] Whilst awaiting a commission for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 1977, BBC producer Richard Imison sent Adams' pilot script to the Doctor Who production office. Script editor Anthony Read was impressed and commissioned Adams to write The Pirate Planet (1978).[78]
Adams replaced Read as script editor in October 1978 for the series' 17th season (1979-80).[79] Adams heavily rewrote Terry Nation's script for Destiny of the Daleks (1979) to bring it within budget.[80] He co-wrote City of Death (1979) with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by David Fisher; it was credited to the pseudonym "David Agnew".[81] In 2008, The Daily Telegraph named the serial as one of the ten greatest Doctor Who stories.[82] Adams wrote the unaired serial Shada, which was only partly filmed due to industrial action at the BBC.[83] Adams also pitched a story for season 17 where the Doctor becomes a bitter recluse and is eventually called back into action. This storyline inspired Steven Moffat to write the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas special "The Snowmen".[84][85]
Adams left Doctor Who in 1979.[77] Scenes from Shada were used to cover Tom Baker's absence in "The Five Doctors" (1983).[86] As Shada's production was abandoned, Adams reused its story elements in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He was unhappy with his script for Shada, calling it a "patchwork", and was extremely displeased when the existing footage was released on home media in 1992 (it has been stated that he signed over permission for the project's release by accident). Per his request, he was not credited on the release and his fee was donated to Comic Relief.[86][87]
He declined lucrative offers to novelise his Doctor Who scripts and did not allow others to do so in his lifetime.[88][89] Shada was novelised by Gareth Roberts in 2012, and City of Death and The Pirate Planet by James Goss in 2015 and 2017 respectively.[90] Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen was novelised by Goss in 2018.[77] In 2003, Shada was adapted into an audio drama starring Paul McGann. A partially-animated reconstruction of Shada voiced by most of the original cast was released in 2017.[83][91]
Dirk Gently
Adams satirised detective fiction with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987), a humorous whodunit novel about a "holistic detective" named Dirk Gently. A sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, was published in 1988.[64][92] Before his death he was writing a third Dirk Gently novel, which he apparently considered adapting into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide novel. The unfinished novel was posthumously published in 2002 under the title The Salmon of Doubt.[93][94] After Adams' death, the Dirk Gently series was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 series (2007–2008) starring Harry Enfield,[95][96] a BBC television series (2010–2012) starring Stephen Mangan[97] and a BBC America television series (2016–2017) starring Samuel Barnett.[98]
Music
Music was a significant part of Adams' life.[99] During a segment on music programme Private Passions, Adams remarked that he "would have loved to have been a rock musician".[100] He had a collection of 24 left-handed electric guitars[101] and also studied piano as a child.[102][103] Procol Harum's song Grand Hotel inspired the restaurant Milliways from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.[104][105] He cited the Beatles as one of his biggest creative influences.[106] He was also a devotee of Johann Sebastian Bach and called the Mass in B minor "one of the great pinnacles of human achievement".[71]
Adams was a huge Pink Floyd fan.[107] His official biography shares its name with "Wish You Were Here"[108][109] and an excerpt of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was featured in the third episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series (this was cut from commercial releases).[110] Pink Floyd's outré live shows, as well as their song "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", inspired the fictional rock band Disaster Area from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe who crash a spaceship into a star as a concert stunt. Like the members of Pink Floyd, the frontman of Disaster Area was involved in a tax avoidance scheme.[107] Adams became good friends with the band and,[109][107] on his 42nd birthday, he was invited to play guitar with them live on stage in Earls Court.[100][111] He also suggested the name for their 1994 album The Division Bell from the lyrics to its track "High Hopes".[112][113] Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour performed at Adams' memorial service in 2001,[114] and at what would have been Adams's 60th birthday in 2012.[111][109]
Video games and digital projects
Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986, he participated in a week-long brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy as a parody of events in his own life.[citation needed][115][67]
Adams was a founder-director and Chief Fantasist of The Digital Village, a digital media and Internet company with which he created Starship Titanic, a Codie award-winning and BAFTA-nominated adventure game, which was published in 1998 by Simon & Schuster.[116][117] Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project, an experimental attempt at making The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality, and at harnessing the collective brainpower of the internet community. It was hosted by BBC Online from 2001 to 2011.[116]
In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland which featured Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the assistant pictured in Apple's Knowledge Navigator video of future concepts from 1987),[118][119][120] and interviews with Ted Nelson, the co-inventor of hypertext and the person who coined the term. Adams was an early adopter and advocate of hypertext.[citation needed]
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Personal beliefs and activism
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Atheism and views on religion
"...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'"[121]
—Adams in September 1998, expressing disbelief in the fine-tuned universe argument for God
Though an "active Christian" as a child,[71] in adulthood Adams described himself as a "radical atheist". He added "radical" for emphasis so he would not be mistaken for an agnostic. He remained fascinated by religion because of its effect on human affairs, stating "I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing."[122][123] The evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins invited Adams to participate in his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, where Adams read a passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about a talking cow which had been bred to desire being eaten.[124] Dawkins cited Adams in his 2006 book The God Delusion, jokingly calling him his greatest convert to atheism.[125]
Environmental activism
Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kākāpō and baiji, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audiobook, e-book and picture slide show.[citation needed] Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels, formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See.[126]
Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed the 'Meeting a Gorilla' passage from Last Chance to See to the book The Great Ape Project.[127] This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human and non-human.[citation needed]
In 1994, Adams participated in a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino suit[128] for the British charity organisation Save the Rhino International. Puppeteer William Todd-Jones, who had originally worn the suit in the London Marathon to raise money and bring awareness to the group, also participated in the climb wearing a rhino suit; Adams wore the suit while travelling to the mountain before the climb began. About £100,000 was raised through that event, benefiting schools in Kenya and a black rhinoceros preservation programme in Tanzania. Adams was also an active supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.[citation needed]
Since 2003, Save the Rhino has held an annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture around the time of his birthday to raise money for environmental campaigns.[129]
Technology and innovation
Adams bought his first word processor in 1982, having considered one as early as 1979. His first purchase was a Nexu. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 1000.[130] In Last Chance to See, Adams mentions his Cambridge Z88, which he had taken to Zaire on a quest to find the northern white rhinoceros.[131]
Adams's posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features several articles by him on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser, and in The Independent on Sunday. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that he had "adored" his Apple Macintosh ("or rather my family of however many Macintoshes it is that I've recklessly accumulated over the years") since he first saw one at Infocom's offices in Boston in 1984.[132]
Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. He was the first person to buy a Mac in Europe, the second being Stephen Fry.[133] Adams was also an "Apple Master", celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (others included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video was available on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. He said it was "awesome...", which was also the last word he wrote on his site.[134]
Adams was an early adopter of the internet.[135][136] He used email to correspond with Steve Meretzky in the early 1980s, during their collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[130] While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup, alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy.[137] Challenges to the authenticity of his messages later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue.[citation needed] In 1996, Adams was a keynote speaker at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) where he described the personal computer as being a modelling device. The video of his keynote speech is archived on Channel 9.[138] Adams was also a keynote speaker for the April 2001 Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, one of the major technical conferences on embedded system engineering.[139]
Chess-playing computers Deep Thought and Deep Blue were named after the fictional Deep Thought supercomputer imagined by Adams.[140][141] Google's AI research laboratory DeepMind was also named in homage. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk called the writer the "best philosopher ever", and in 2018 he launched a Tesla car into space with a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide in its glovebox.[54]
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Personal life
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Adams moved to Upper Street, Islington in 1981 and to Duncan Terrace, a few minutes walk away, in the late 1980s.[142][citation needed]
In the early 1980s, Adams had a relationship with novelist Sally Emerson, who was separated from her husband at that time. Adams later dedicated his book Life, the Universe and Everything to Emerson. In 1981, Emerson returned to her husband, Peter Stothard, a contemporary of Adams at Brentwood School and later editor of The Times. Adams was soon introduced by friends to Jane Belson with whom he later became romantically involved.[citation needed][143]
Belson was the "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles together during 1983, while Adams worked on an early screenplay adaptation of Hitchhiker's. When the deal fell through, they moved back to London and after several separations ("He is currently not certain where he lives, or with whom")[144] and a broken engagement,[citation needed] they married in November 1991.[92]
Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994.[145][146][citation needed] In 1999, the family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until his death. Following the funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London.[147] Belson died on 7 September 2011 of cancer, aged 59.[148][citation needed]
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Death and legacy
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Adams died of a heart attack due to undiagnosed coronary artery disease on 11 May 2001, aged 49, after resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Santa Barbara, California, United States.[149][150][151] His funeral was held on 16 May in Santa Barbara. His ashes were placed in Highgate Cemetery in north London in June 2002.[152] A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St Martin-in-the-Fields church, Trafalgar Square, London. This was the first church service broadcast online by the BBC.[114]
Two days before Adams died, the Minor Planet Center announced that asteroid 18610 Arthurdent had been named after the protagonist of The Hitchhiker's Guide.[153][154] In 2005, the asteroid 25924 Douglasadams was named in his memory.[155]
In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays and letters as well as eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the US edition), and Terry Jones (in the US paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was originally intended to become a new Dirk Gently novel but might have later become the sixth Hitchhiker novel.[156][94]
Other events after Adams's death include radio dramatisations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's series and the completion of [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film)|the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The film, released in 2005, posthumously credits Adams as a producer and several design elements – including a head-shaped planet seen near the end of the film – incorporated Adams's features.[citation needed]
BBC Radio 4 also commissioned a third Dirk Gently radio series based on the incomplete chapters of The Salmon of Doubt and written by Kim Fuller;[157] but this was dropped in favour of a BBC-TV series based on the two completed novels.[158] A sixth Hitchhiker novel, And Another Thing..., by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, was released on 12 October 2009 (the 30th anniversary of the first book), published with the support of Adams's estate. A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime adaptation and an audio book soon followed.
On 25 May 2001, two weeks after Adams's death, his fans organised a tribute known as Towel Day, which has been observed every year since then.[159]
An Apple Macintosh SE/30 once owned by Adams can be seen on display at The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.[160]
In 2018, John Lloyd presented an hour-long episode of the BBC Radio Four documentary Archive on 4 discussing Adams's private papers, which are held at St John's College, Cambridge.[161]
Travessa Douglas Adams, a street at 27°35′21.8″S 48°39′44.0″W in São José, Santa Catarina, Brazil, is named in Adams's honour.[162]
In March 2021, Unbound announced a crowdfunder for 42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams, on the 20th anniversary of his death, a book based on Adams's papers, edited by Kevin Jon Davies.[62]
The annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lectures began in 2003.[163]
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Awards and nominations
Body of work
See also
- List of animal rights advocates
- List of atheists in film, radio, television and theater
- Save the Rhino, organisation co-founded by Adams
References
Further reading
External links
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