Douglas+Adams

=Douglas Adams ( 1952 – 2001 )=

//Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so// - Douglas Adams

(source: click on the picture) Douglas Adams is one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time. He became a prominent writer with the BBC radio series The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. The radio series have later become a bestselling novel, tv series, musical, and a very popular Hollywood movie.

Douglas Noel Adams was born in Cambridge in England on March 11. When he was five his parents god divorced, and he moved to Brentwood with his younger sister Sue, and his mother. Both his mother and father remarried, and he has also got three half siblings. He went to school at Brentwood school, Essex. Here he was the first and only pupil to ever get a “ten out of ten” on a story from a very strict teacher named Frank Halford.

Later he went to St John College, in Cambridge. Here he received a master degree in English literature. Though his English teacher had encouraged his creative writings already in elementary school it was not until college he started writing more seriously. Adams worked with television, radio, and literature. But it was with the Hitch Hikers Guide to the galaxy that he really became famous. The novel itself sold fifteen million copies only during his lifetime, and became a cult for science fiction fans all over the world.

Douglas was introduced to his wife, Jane Belson by a mutual friend in the early 80’s, and in 1991 they married. They lived together in Islington, London, and had a daughter named Polly together, she was born 1994. In 1999 they moved to Santa Barbara in California, USA, because Douglas signed a contract with Disney to contribute to the Hitch Hikers Guide To the Galaxy movie in 1997.

Tragically Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on may 11, 2001, only 49 yeas old. In his memory The Towel Day is celebrated on the 25th may. (Towels are considered to be an important item in the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.)

All of Adams’ writing is penetrated with an obscure and ironic humour. His views upon humanity is very visible in his books.

In the hitch hikers series there are five books: • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) • Life, the Universe and Everything (1982) • So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish (1984) • Mostly Harmless (1992)

Adams has also written a triology called the dirk gently series. • Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) • The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) • The Salmon of Doubt (incomplete, 2002)