Douglas Adams

Douglas Noël Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952 and grew up in Essex, joining the Footlights comedy club at St John's College in 1971 with hopes of becoming the next John Cleese. A brief writing partnership with Graham Chapman earned him a single Monty Python credit in 1974, but the years that followed brought rejection and unproduced scripts until he landed work on Doctor Who in 1978. That same year he was commissioned to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for BBC radio, and the 1979 book adaptation brought sudden fame - he'd spend the next decade writing Dirk Gently novels, comic dictionaries, and the travel book Last Chance to See. His output slowed in the 1990s as he turned to digital media projects and lectures on technology, procrastinating famously along the way. He died in 2001 at 49, leaving behind an unfinished novel published the next year in The Salmon of Doubt, along with a reputation for radical atheism, environmental advocacy, and an abiding love of rock music.