Douglas Adams was an English author, born in Cambridge in 1952, the comic genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and one of the best-loved humorists of his time.
He began in radio and comedy, worked as a script editor on Doctor Who, and first sent Hitchhiker's out into the world as a BBC radio series in 1978. It became a publishing phenomenon: a five-book 'trilogy' - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to Mostly Harmless - selling many millions of copies with its blend of absurdist cosmic comedy, deadpan philosophy and unforgettable inventions, from the answer '42' to the improbable, towel-toting everyman Arthur Dent. He also wrote the Dirk Gently novels and, with the zoologist Mark Carwardine, the endangered-species travelogue Last Chance to See, which he counted his proudest work.
A radical atheist, a passionate environmentalist and an incurable technophile - and the owner, by his own account, of far too many guitars - he died suddenly in 2001, aged forty-nine. His humour, and his fans' devotion, remain undimmed: every 25 May, readers still mark Towel Day in his memory.
