Richard Adams, author of the classic Watership Down, has passed away aged 96.
The news was confirmed by his daughter, Juliet Johnson, who said that his father died peacefully on Christmas Eve, after being ill for some time.
Watership Down, which was Adams’ first book, is a classical children’s tale about a group of rabbits looking for a new home after the destruction of their warren.
The son of a county doctor, Adams was 52 when he wrote the book, which started its life as a means to entertain his daughters during a car journey. He was then encouraged to write the spoken tale down, a process that took him almost two years. The manuscript was rejected 14 times before being finally published in 1972. Watership Down would go on to sell over 50m copies worldwide.
The book generated enough wealth for him to retire from the civil service and become a full time writer. Adams wrote Shardik (which Stephen King would later reference in The Dark Tower books, naming one of the Guardians of the beams after it), The Plague Dogs, The Girl in a Swing, and many more.
The author died peacefully on Christmas Eve.
It seems fitting to honor Adams’ memory with a quote from his most famous tale: ‘My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”