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What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?

He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence.

He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back.

Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England (shortly before the announcement of an even more influential DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid). He was a self-described “strange child” who did not learn to speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist (“I never made it because my arithmetic was so bad”), then went to Cambridge to study English, with ambitions that involved becoming part of the tradition of British writer/performers (of which the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus are the best-known example).

When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking across Europe, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought, “Somebody ought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ” Then he went to sleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all about it.

He left Cambridge in 1975 and went to London where his many writing and performing projects tended, in the main, not to happen. He worked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and sketches for abortive projects (among them a show for Ringo Starr which contained the germ of Starship Titanic) and with writer-producer John Lloyd (they pitched a series called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs, a comedy about two astronomers in “an observatory on Mt. Everest”—The idea for that was minimum casting, minimum set, and we’d just try to sell the series on cheapness”).