Richard George Adams was born on May 9, 1920, in Newbury, Berkshire, to a country doctor. He spent his early years in the countryside with views towards the real Watership Down, on the Hampshire border. One of his earliest memories was seeing a local man pushing a handcart full of dead rabbits down the street, which made him realize that rabbits were not just cute creatures, but also things that could be hunted and killed.
Adams was sent to boarding school at the age of nine, where he had a miserable time. He won a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He served in the Army for five years before returning to his studies.
After the war, Adams joined the civil service and spent part of his career managing the clean air program designed to reduce pollution. However, it was a car journey with his family to see Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon that changed his life. His bored children asked for a story, and he began telling them a tale about a group of rabbits attempting to escape from their threatened warren.
Adams was persuaded to write down the story, which took him over two years to complete. However, he struggled to find a publisher, receiving 14 rejections before one finally agreed to publish it. The book, Watership Down, was hailed as a children's classic and went on to sell over 50 million copies.
The book's success led to Adams becoming a full-time writer and tax exile on the Isle of Man. He wrote several more books, including Shardik, an epic tale of a bear who is a god in an imaginary world, and The Plague Dogs, an attack on animal experimentation.
Adams became president of the RSPCA, but his attempts to persuade the charity to adopt a more campaigning stance were unsuccessful. He resigned ahead of a vote that would have severely curtailed his presidential powers. Despite his commitment to animal welfare, Adams refused to condemn the decision to gas rabbits on the real Watership Down in 1998 after their burrows began undermining the hill.
In all, Adams wrote over 20 books, including The Girl in a Swing, a ghostly love story with an undercurrent of eroticism, and a prequel to Shardik, Maia, which was criticized for its sexual and sado-masochistic content. Richard Adams died on Christmas Eve 2016, aged 96.
