Richard Adams
1 book analyzed
Biography
Richard Adams (1920-2016) was a British civil servant who began telling the story of Watership Down to his daughters during long car journeys. He had no literary ambitions — the novel was rejected by thirteen publishers before Rex Collings accepted it in 1972. Adams served in the British Army during WWII, including the Battle of Oosterbeek (Arnhem), and his experience of military organization, leadership under pressure, and the arbitrary violence of war saturates the novel. He studied Modern History at Oxford, giving him the intellectual framework for the political allegory. He worked in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, where he observed bureaucratic power structures firsthand. The novel made him wealthy and famous at fifty-two, after decades of anonymous civil service.