Adams, Richard (George Adams) (1920– ), British novelist and writer of children's fantasy literature. His distinctive trademark is the use of animal protagonists: rabbits search for the promised land in Watership Down (1972), a bear is deified in Shardik (1972), and dogs escape from an experimental lab in The Plague Dogs (1977). Adams's choice of subject‐matter not only demonstrates a sensitivity toward animals; it also reflects his interest in the animal tale, which suggests we should read his stories as allegories for the human condition.

In his well‐known novel Watership Down, Adams uses the basic plot of a group of rabbits setting out to found a new warren as a pretext to explore various socio‐political utopias (or dystopias). The central exodus or quest narrative is punctuated with tales about El‐ahrairah (‘the Prince with a Thousand Enemies’), a trickster‐type folkloric hero whose exploits provide the group with exempla and mythological explanations for their rabbit‐universe. Given the importance of these tales to the main narrative, it comes as no surprise that Adams later published versions of them, along with other stories from the novel, in Tales from Watership Down (1996).

Bibliography

• Meyer, Charles A. (ed.), ‘Richard Adams' Watership Down’, spec. issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 6.1 (1993).
• Petzold, Dieter, ‘Fantasy out of Myth and Fable: Animal Stories in Rudyard Kipling and Richard Adams’, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 12.1 (spring 1987).

— Anne Duggan