Although he is the author of seven full-length novels, four of which have exclusively human protagonists, Richard Adams is perceived primarily but erroneously to be a writer of pastoral anthropomorphic fantasy. This perception derives from the enormous commercial success of his first novel, Watership Down (1972), set in the English countryside of Berkshire. It centers on a band of rabbits whose quest for a new warren is treated in a serious, epic fashion. Their rabbit existence is realized without sentimentality and with a biological realism hitherto unknown in the genre of anthropomorphism. The reader enters the rabbits' world, which is realized with great imaginative solidity further intensified by the close-textured, detailed description of a small area of the Berkshire countryside. This close focus caught public attention in the 1970s when there was a new ecological awareness that the natural world was under threat and has given the author the well-deserved reputation of "a country writer."
Richard George Adams was born in Newbury, Berkshire, on 9 May 1920, the fourth child of a country doctor, Evelyn George Beadon Adams, and Lilian Rosa (née Button) Adams.
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