March 11, 2013- Google doodle is remembering celebrated author and humorist Douglas Adams on his 61st birthday. Adams, who tragically passed away from a heart attack at the age of 49 on May 11, 2001, is best known for his cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Monday’s Google doodle features many facets of Douglas’ popular comic science fiction series which were adapted into a movie in 2005. The doodle displays a cup of tea, which is a reference to one of his Dirk Gently detective novels, calledThe Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
When we click on the lift door on the doodle, one of his most popular and enduring characters from the Hitchhiker novels, Marvin the paranoid android, comes to fore.
There are several other references to the Hitchhiker’s Guide. With many clicks, some of Adams’s best fictional inventions, including the Babel Fish, which can be inserted in your ear to translate any language, are on the show.
Born on March 11, 1952, Douglas Noel Adams was an English writer, humorist and dramatist born in Cambridge England. From early age, he showed a flair for writing. After graduating in English literature in 1974, he he moved to London with an aim to become a TV and radio writer.
In London, he met Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, and they formed a writing partnership. Adams was credited with writing one of the sketches in a Monty Python episode, becoming one of only two people outside the original Monty Python members to be given a writing credit.
They also attempted non-Python projects, but got nowhere and Adams was forced to series of non-writing-related jobs.
Adams’s career took off after he got an opportunity to work with the BBC as a radio producer. While working with BBC, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was born as a science-fiction comedy series for the radio. The first series – consisting of six episodes – was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March and April 1978, and received an excellent response. A seventh episode was broadcast on December 24, 1978.
The series were adapted into a book and it was first published in 1979. The book sold over 250,000 copies within three months of its release.
A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21-25 January 1980. Four more books followed, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992).
He also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff(1983), Last Chance to See (1990). A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
He also wrote three stories for the television series Doctor Who.
Adams died of a heart attack on 11 May 2001, aged 49.
