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Richard Adams

Richard Adams. By: Tyler Rettberg. Thesis Statement. Richard Adams incorporated many themes from his life into his many books. Childhood.

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Richard Adams

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  1. Richard Adams By: Tyler Rettberg

  2. Thesis Statement Richard Adams incorporated many themes from his life into his many books.

  3. Childhood Richard George Adams was born on May 9, 1920 in Newbury, Berkshire, United Kingdom. When he was born, World War I was just ending. The world was still in chaos and disease was spreading like wildfire. He went to school until he was 18, and then went on to study Modern History in Worchester College in Oxford.

  4. Military Experiences In 1940, two years after Adams went to college, World War II began. Adams had to end his studies temporarily to fight the War on the side of the allies. He was deployed into the Middle East, thankfully away from all the fighting. Shortly after he left however, the Battle of Britain occurred, which was the bombing of the U.K. by the German forces.

  5. Books and Short Stories • Watership Down (1972) • Shardik (1974) • Nature Through the Seasons (1975) • The Tyger Voyage (1976) • The Plague Dogs (1977) • The Ship's Cat (1977) • Nature Day and Night (1978) • The Girl in a Swing (1980) • The Iron Wolf and Other Stories (1980) • The Phoenix Tree (1980) • The Legend of Te Tuna (1982) • Voyage Through the Antarctic (1982) • Maia (1984) • A Nature Diary (1985) • The Bureaucrats (1985) • Traveller (1988) • The Day Gone By (autobiography) (1990) • Tales from Watership Down (collection of linked stories) (1996) • The Outlandish Knight (1999) • Daniel (2006) • Gentle Footprints (2010)

  6. British Civil Services After his graduation in 1948, Adams joined the British Civil Services. He held the title of Assistant Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Later he became assistant secretary to the Department of the Environment. In 1974, after 26 years of working for the British civil services, he quit to become a full time author. This was around the same time he published Shardik.

  7. Watership Down In the early 1970’s, Richard Adams went on a long road trip with his wife Elizabeth and his daughters Juliet and Rosamund. To pass the time, he told his daughters a story he came up with off the top of his head about rabbits. This grew to be his original ideas for Watership Down. In 1972, after his daughters persuaded him to do so, Adams published Watership Down. He was then given international praise and Watership Down became a classic, winning the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Award for children’s fiction. Today, it has sold 50 million copies worldwide. It has never been out of print in 39 years.

  8. Influences on Watership Down • The hill where the rabbits eventually settled was based off a hill near Adams’s home. • He based the struggles of the rabbits off of a battle during World War II, the battle of Arnhem, which took place in the Netherlands • Ronald Lockley published the book “The Private Life of The Rabbit” in 1964 which told of the daily habits of rabbits and how they behaved around humans etc.

  9. Shardik In 1974, two years after he finished writing Watership Down, Adams published his second book, Shardik, the book I read for this project. It focuses on a large bear and a hunter named Kelderek. A cult believes that the bear is a message sent by god. Kelderek finds the bear and is told he is to be the bear’s protector. The cult’s leader is a women called the Tuginda and she has many priestesses who help spread her word of lord Shardik, one of them named Melayths. The cult also believes that Shardik wants them to conquer a neighboring country, Bekla. Kelderek is caught up in this idea and Kelderek leads Shardik as a weapon in a war against the natives. He defeats the old king and takes over as Priest King. In five years of his rule, he is overthrown by a man named Elleroth. During the coup, Shardik is injured and Kelderek sets off to keep him alive. While pursuing him however, Kelderek is kidnapped by a slave trader who intends to sell him. After investigating what is happening, Kelderek finds out that Elleroth’s son has also been kidnapped. However, Shardik bursts from the trees and kills the slave trader, freeing them all but is also killed in the process. Kelderek is then forgiven for all the crimes the new government says he has committed and goes on to govern a small province, free of the cult and of Shardik.

  10. Influences on Shardik • The War that Richard Adams fought in may have caused him to have Kelderek fight a war to take over Bekla. • Adams held a position in the government at one point, which may have caused him to write about Kelderek being part of the government.

  11. Personal Experiences Several years after Watership Down, Adams journeyed to the Antarctic with his Ronald Lockley, the man who wrote “The Private Life of Rabbits” which greatly influenced his writing of “Watership Down”. He spent a good bit of time on this expedition and even ended up writing a book about his journey, “The Voyage Through the Antartic”. Also, he served one year as president of the RSPCA, or the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. On his 90th birthday, Adams received a portrait of himself by a local artist. Also on his 90th birthday, Adams made a poem about his home, Whitchurch, Hampshire called Gentle Footprints to give all the money it makes to the Born Free foundation.

  12. Family Richard Adams currently lives with his wife, Elizabeth, in their home in Whitchurch. He has two daughters, Juliet and Rosamund who he originally told Watership Down to. He also has 6 grandchildren: Lucy, Sarah, Miranda, Grace, Robert, and Maeve.

  13. Awards Watership Down alone won the Carnegie Medal in 1972, the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize in 1973, the California Young Reader Medal in 1997 and was voted the 42nd greatest book of all time in the 2003 survey of the British Public done by The Big Read.

  14. Books’ Reception Richard Adams’s most successful book by far is Watership Down. Almost all of his other books have been unsuccessful both critically and publicly. The only book other than Watership Down that was even a slight success was Plague Dogs.

  15. Stats and Info on Watership Down • Stayed at New York Time’s bestseller for 3 months and didn’t come off of list until February 1975 • Millions of copies have been sold worldwide • Sold a million copies in record time • Has become a timeless classic worldwide

  16. Adaptions Watership Down has been made into several different types of media. In 1978, an animated film was created based on Watership Down. In 1999, an animated series was also made based on Watership Down. It ran for three seasons, with the first two seasons recounting the book, while the third season was an all new plot branching out the story of Watership Down. In 2006, a play based on Watership Down was made for a theatre in London. The Plague dogs was also adapted into an animated film a lot like Watership Down.

  17. Review of Shardik On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Shardik a 6. It was pretty good, but it was to odd for me. It focused a lot on the cult and it made many of the main characters hard to relate to. The two main characters are Kelderek and Shardik. I thought that Shardik was almost an exact opposite as Hazel. Hazel was a medium sized leader, while Shardik was a massive, murderous bear that killed anything that got in his way. Kelderek was a simple hunter that fell victim to a cult. It was very predictable. I almost always could tell what was going to happen next. There never were any real plot twists. It was a pretty good book, but it was no Watership Down.

  18. Reference Page “Richard Adams”, www.Wikipedia.com, May 19, 2011, May 26, 2011, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Adams> “Richard Adams Biography”, http://www.theweeweb.co.uk, May 20, 2011, <http://www.theweeweb.co.uk/public/author_profile.php?id=47> “Watership Down by Richard Adams”, http://www.enotes.com, 2011, May 18, 2011, <http://www.enotes.com/watership-down/author-biography>

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