Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams, who lived from 11 March 1952 to 11 May 2001, was an English author, humourist and screenwriter. He wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which began in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy and grew into a trilogy of five books that sold more than fourteen million copies in his lifetime, with a television series, a video game and a film adaptation. He was born in Cambridge, studied at St John's College and joined the Footlights comedy club, then worked as a script editor on Doctor Who. His later books include Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the comic dictionaries The Meaning of Liff and the travel book Last Chance to See. He was known for environmental advocacy and a self-described radical atheism, and he died at the age of forty-nine.