Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge on March 11, 1952. He studied at Brentwood in Essex and St John's College. After graduating, he began writing for radio and television, as well as reviews for London theaters, where he sometimes performed and directed. In between, he took on various odd jobs, such as a hospital porter, builder, chicken coop cleaner, and radio producer. For a period, he also worked on the scripts for the successful TV series "Dr Who." On March 8, 1978, the first episode of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which he wrote, aired on BBC radio. Since 1971, when he was 18 and hitchhiking across Europe with a copy of "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe," he had envisioned a similar travel guide for the Galaxy. The series was an immediate success. In 1979, Adams released a book with the same title, based on the radio series, and the following year continued with "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." The adventures of Arthur Dent in our chaotic galaxy garnered a cult following. The series was adapted for television, and Adams continued by writing the third book, "Life, the Universe and Everything" (1982). In 1984, he released the fourth and theoretically final book, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish," making it the first trilogy consisting of four books. Eventually, a fifth book was published, "Mostly Harmless" (1992). Adams also wrote the alternative dictionary "The Meaning of Liff" (1983, with John Lloyd), and the humorous novels featuring the unconventional detective Dirk Gently, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (1987) and "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" (1988). In 1998, Disney acquired the film rights to the series, and a year later, after completing the screenplay, Adams moved to Santa Barbara, California, with his wife Jane Belson and their daughter Polly, to be closer to Hollywood. At the age of 49, on May 11, 2001, Adams suffered a heart attack at a gym in Santa Barbara and passed away shortly thereafter at his home.