Saying Goodbye to Richard Adams, Author of Watership Down

Some might say a life that included serious study, service during World War II, a stellar career, and a loving family is more than most people hope for. Richard Adams, who passed away on Christmas Eve at 96, had all of that in 1970, when he was 50 years old. Then, he tried something new: he began to write. Two years later, his masterpiece Watership Down was published, the classic “book about rabbits” that continues to astound new readers to this day.
A Life Well Lived
Adams was born in Berkshire, England, in 1920. In 1938 he went off to Worcester College at Oxford, but two years later he was called up by the British Army to serve in the Second World War, where he posted to the Royal Army Service Corps. Although he served all over the world with distinction, he never saw any fighting. When he returned home he went back to school, began a distinguished career in the civil service, and started a family. For more than 20 years he worked diligently at both, and often entertained his daughters Juliet and Rosamond on long car trips with stories about a warren of rabbits—stories he made up off the top of his head.
The Mad Risk
His daughters urged Adams to write the stories down, and he set to work, writing in the evenings. Inspired by a lifetime of empathy for animals, he spent just two years writing what became Watership Down. The book was rejected by several publishers before Adams found Rex Collings, who was running a literal one-man publishing firm. Collings was quoted as saying “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?”
The book was a sensation. Adams created a world based on the actual behavior and social structures of rabbits and their warrens, a world that felt incredibly real and magical simultaneously. His story of a few young rabbits who flee the destruction of their warren and seek a new home is an epic story of adventure exploring deep issues of morality, courage, and freedom that also explored how society itself forms—in ways both good and bad. It hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for eight months, eventually becoming Penguin Books’ all-time bestseller.
Beyond Watership
The book’s success freed Adams, at age 52, from the need to work. Becoming a full-time author, he went on to write 19 more books, including Shardik, The Plague Dogs, and Tales from Watership Down. The latter is a sequel to the original novel, published in 1996 as interconnected short stories covering rabbit mythology as well as the characters introduced in its predecessor. Shardik casts a long shadow in the fantasy genre—Stephen King named the cyborg bear in The Waste Lands after the bear in Adams’ book—and The Plague Dogs is another powerful exploration of the world from the point of view of animals, in this case two gentle dogs who escape from a government-run drug-testing facility and become the subjects of a hysterical nationwide dog hunt. While none of his later work attained the stature of Watership, it met with success and critical acclaim.
True to Himself
Richard Adams was a gentle, deep-thinking man of faith and conviction. He lived in the English countryside and he looked like it, favoring tweed coats and a ruddy, sunburnt complexion. He wrote in longhand, always pausing to read poetry before sitting down to work. His Christian faith influenced everything he wrote; he was a man who once said he didn’t imagine his characters questioning their values—he thought conflict should come from outside a character.
The last thing Adams published was a short story in the charity anthology Gentle Footprints, written when he was just turning 90 and published in 2010. The thought that the world has seen the last of his gentle, wise stories is a sad cap to the year, but we can remember and take comfort in the rabbit Hazel’s final moments, looking out over the warren he helped to establish, safe and prosperous, as his angelic companion speaks to him: “You needn’t worry about them. They’ll be alright—and thousands like them.”