Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English writer and humorist whose The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy became one of the most influential comic science fiction works of the twentieth century. Adams began the story as a BBC Radio 4 series in 1978, drawing on his work as a Cambridge-educated comedy writer (including a brief stint contributing to Monty Python's Flying Circus) and a period writing for Doctor Who, for which he also served as script editor. The 1979 novel adaptation became a bestseller and grew into a five-book series that Adams himself described, with characteristic self-deprecation, as an increasingly bleak 'trilogy' -- its tone darkening across Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, and especially Mostly Harmless (1992), even as its absurdist humor and deadpan world-building (the number 42, the Babel fish, the Total Perpetual Improbability Drive) became touchstones far beyond science fiction fandom. Alongside Hitchhiker's, Adams created the two-novel Dirk Gently series, applying the same interconnected, everything-is-secretly-related sensibility to a detective format, and co-wrote humor reference books including The Meaning of Liff with longtime collaborator John Lloyd. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001 at 49, leaving a third Dirk Gently novel unfinished; a sixth Hitchhiker's book, And Another Thing... (2009), was later written by Eoin Colfer with the blessing of Adams's estate.