Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG).

Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of six (or five, according to the author) books which sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime.

He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, including the unaired serial Shada, co-wrote City of Death (1979), and served as script editor for its 17th season.

Adams was a self-proclaimed "radical atheist", an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, and a lover of fast cars,[3] technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh.

[6] His parents divorced in 1957; Douglas, Susan and their mother moved then to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood, Essex, run by his maternal grandparents.

[12] On the strength of an essay on religious poetry that discussed the Beatles and William Blake, Adams was awarded an Exhibition in English at St John's College, Cambridge (where his father had likewise been a student),[13] going up in 1971.

He was not elected immediately as he had hoped, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith; they formed a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams".

A version of the Revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being discovered by Monty Python's Graham Chapman.

The pair also co-wrote the "Marilyn Monroe" sketch that appeared on the soundtrack album of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

At the beginning of episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War", Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another but never gets started.

[citation needed] At the beginning of episode 44, "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile onto a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron...").

[5] To make ends meet, he took a series of odd jobs, including as a hospital porter, barn builder, and chicken shed cleaner.

Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet.

He had also previously attempted to submit a potential film script, called Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, which later became his novel Life, the Universe and Everything (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series).

Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular, the character of Professor Chronotis.

Adams came up with an outline for a pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that could be used in the series.

While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that got worse as he published novels.

[34] In 1980, Adams began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a film, making several trips to Los Angeles, and working with Hollywood studios and potential producers.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics".

[43] Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell, by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks, "High Hopes".

[43] Pink Floyd and the song "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" in particular, inspired Adams to create the rock band Disaster Area who appear in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who planned to crash a space ship into a nearby star as a stunt during a concert.

In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project, an experimental attempt at making The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality, and at harnessing the collective brainpower of the internet community.

[46] In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland[48] which featured Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the assistant pictured in Apple's Knowledge Navigator video of future concepts from 1987), and interviews with Ted Nelson, the co-inventor of hypertext and the person who coined the term.

"[50] The evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins invited Adams to participate in his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, where Dawkins calls Adams from the audience to read a passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe which satirises the absurdity of the thought that any one species would exist on Earth merely to serve as a meal to another species, such as humans.

This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kākāpō and baiji, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name.

[54] This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human and non-human.

Since 2003, Save the Rhino has held an annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture around the time of his birthday to raise money for environmental campaigns.

[56] While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup, alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy.

[67] Adams died of a heart attack due to undiagnosed coronary artery disease on 11 May 2001, aged 49, after resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Montecito, California.

[77] A sixth Hitchhiker novel, And Another Thing..., by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, was released on 12 October 2009 (the 30th anniversary of the first book), published with the support of Adams's estate.