Douglas Adams (Douglas Noel Adams) Biography

British novelist and scriptwriter, born in Cambridge, educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He is best known for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and its sequels, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992), all of which originated in a 1978 BBC radio series later transferred to television. In these novels, two characters (the human Arthur Dent, and the humanoid alien Ford Prefect, author of the actual Guide) travel through space after Earth has been demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. Their adventures hitch-hiking across the galaxy are picaresque, involving a series of bizarre encounters with alien life-forms, including a super-intelligent species of white mice intent on discovering, with the aid of the vast, organic computer which is the Earth, the meaning of ‘life, the universe and everything’. Written in a comic idiom, their adventures parody science fiction conventions, while subtly extolling the allures of space opera. A later series of metaphysical detective novels includes Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988).