Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, dies at 96

Richard Adams, author of the literary classic Watership Down, died Saturday in Oxfordshire, England, at age 96, according to one of his daughters, Juliet Johnson, who said he had become progressively weaker in recent weeks.

“He died of what used to be called old age,” she told the Associated Press, adding that her father also suffered from a blood disorder.

When Adams was 52, his daughters Juliet and Rosamond insisted he pen a story he had begun telling them on a road trip and often continued at bedtime. That story became Watership Down, the adventures of a group of rabbits striving to survive and establish a free society.

Johnson said the characters her father described to her and her sister were “a bit more babyish, more simplified” than the ones that turned up in the finished book.

“I think for Dad, that was just the beginnings,” she said of Adams’ oral storytelling. “It took him two or three years. He took a lot of trouble writing that book.”

His manuscript was rejected seven times until its publication in 1972. It was released in the United States in 1974.

Adams had never written fantasy before Watership Down but was well read. He recalled “living in” Dr. Doolittle as a child and identifying so closely with the stories of Beatrix Potter he once said of himself, “I was Peter Rabbit.”

He also read stories many would consider far too dark for a child: “I was allowed to read anything I liked when I was little, and I liked all sorts of things that I shouldn’t have been reading. I stumbled upon frightening literature. Poe. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries.”

When Watership Down became wildly popular, securing both the Carnegie Medal in Literature in 1972 and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 1973, Adams left his long-term work in the British civil service to write full time. He did so from his cozy home in Whitchurch, England, just 10 miles from his birthplace of Newbury, often dressed in wool and tweed with a twinkle in his pale blue eyes.

Adams dismissed nearly all the deep interpretations of his story. From the beginning he denied the idea that the story was a parable or an allegory for religion or complicated philosophies. Instead, he said it was simply a good story that he made up for his two daughters one morning on the drive to school. The BBC reports that it and Netflix plans to release four-part animated series of the book in 2017.

Adams spent the remainder of his life writing novels as full of blood-chilling twists and suspense as his first. He also supported animal rights organizations.

His wife Elizabeth, whom he married in 1949, and his two daughters survive him.