Richard Adams

Richard George Adams (1920–2016) was born in Newbury, Berkshire, and grew up in the English countryside that would provide the landscape of Watership Down — the chalk downlands, beech hangers, and river meadows of north Hampshire. He became one of the most successful English novelists of the late twentieth century through a single, extraordinary book: Watership Down (1972), a novel about rabbits that is simultaneously an adventure epic, a political allegory, a work of natural history, and one of the great English novels about landscape and home.

Life and Career

Adams was educated at Bradfield College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. He served in the Royal Army Service Corps during World War II, seeing action at Arnhem. After the war he joined the Civil Service, where he worked in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Department of the Environment for twenty-five years.

Watership Down began as a story told to his daughters Juliet and Rosamond on car journeys between their home in Berkshire and Stratford-upon-Avon. The children insisted he write it down. He did, and the manuscript was rejected by Rex Collings, Collins, and eleven other publishers before being accepted by a one-man operation, Rex Collings Ltd, which published it in a small edition in 1972. Penguin acquired the paperback rights, and the book became a phenomenon: it won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, sold millions of copies, and was adapted into an animated film (1978) with a voice cast including John Hurt and Zero Mostel.

Adams published several more novels — Shardik (1974), an epic fantasy set in a primitive world where a great bear is worshipped as a god; The Plague Dogs (1977), about two dogs escaping from a research laboratory; The Girl in a Swing (1980); Maia (1984) — but none achieved the critical or commercial success of Watership Down. He lived in Whitchurch, Hampshire, near the real Watership Down, until his death on 24 December 2016.

Major Works and Themes

Watership Down follows a group of rabbits — Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry, and others — who flee their doomed warren and journey across the Hampshire countryside to establish a new home on Watership Down. The novel works on multiple levels: it is a gripping adventure story with genuine suspense and danger; a political allegory exploring different forms of governance (the totalitarian Efrafa, the decadent warren of the Shining Wire, the democratic settlement on the Down); a detailed work of natural history informed by R.M. Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit; and a mythological creation, complete with the rabbit trickster-hero El-ahrairah, whose stories-within-the-story give the book a Homeric resonance.

The novel’s emotional power comes from its evocation of the English countryside as both beautiful and threatened — a pastoral under siege from development, agriculture, and human indifference.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Watership Down was initially reviewed as a children’s book, then adopted by adults, then classified as one of the great modern novels of the English pastoral tradition — a successor to The Wind in the Willows and The Lord of the Rings. Its influence extends to every subsequent animal-centred narrative in English literature and film.

Key Works

• Watership Down (1972)
• Shardik (1974)
• The Plague Dogs (1977)
• The Girl in a Swing (1980)
• Maia (1984)
• Tales from Watership Down (1996)

Collecting Adams

Watership Down (1972, Rex Collings, London) is the essential collecting target. The first edition, published by a small press in a limited initial printing, is scarce and desirable. First editions in the dust jacket — white boards with the Collings imprint — bring $2,000–$8,000; fine copies with bright boards and an unclipped jacket command the highest prices.

The Macmillan first American edition (1974) is far more common and less valuable. Penguin paperback first editions are collected as cultural artefacts of the book’s mass-market breakthrough.

Signed copies are available — Adams signed willingly at events throughout his later life — and bring moderate premiums. Shardik (1974, Allen Lane) and The Plague Dogs (1977, Allen Lane) in first editions with jackets are increasingly collected.