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Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) was a cult British comic radio dramatist, amateur musician and author, most notably of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (HHGG or H2G2). Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a comic book series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams's death. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA".

In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of science fiction staple Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002. His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a self-described "radical atheist" and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Apple Macintosh, and other "techno gizmos." He was a keen technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.

Towards the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom circles.

Early life

Douglas Adams was born to Janet (Donovan) Adams (now Janet Thrift) and Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one other child together, Susan, who was born in March 1955. His parents separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan, and Janet moved in with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma."

Christopher Adams remarried in July 1960, to Mary Judith Stewart (born Judith Robertson). From this marriage, Douglas Adams had a half-sister, Heather. Janet remarried in 1964, to a veterinarian, Ron Thrift, providing two more half-siblings to Douglas: Jane and James Thrift.

Education and early works

Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood, Essex. He took the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended the Preparatory School from 1959 to 1964, then the main school till 1970. He was in the top stream, and specialised in the arts in the sixth form, after which he stayed an extra term in a special seventh form class, customary in the school for those preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams.

While at the prep school, he had an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing writer's block. Some of Adams's earliest writing was published at the school, such as a report on the school's Photography Club in The Brentwoodian (in 1962) or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet (edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). Adams also had a letter and short story published nationally in the UK in the boys' magazine The Eagle in 1965. He met Griff Rhys Jones, who was in the year below, at the school, and was in the same class as "Stuckist" artist Charles Thomson; all three appeared together in a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1968. He was six feet tall (1.83 m) by the time he was 12, and he stopped growing only at 6'5" (1.96 m).

On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that mixed the Beatles with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. Adams attempted early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several other names in British Comedy had been affiliated. He was, however, turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights, Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and found himself working with Rhys Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams graduated with a B.A. in English literature.

Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A version of the same revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being "discovered" by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two formed a brief writing partnership, and Adams earned a writing credit in one episode (episode 45: "Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party") of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons' obsession with paperwork). Adams also contributed to a sketch on the album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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Games - Douglas Adams

Early life

Education and early works

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