Books by Richard Adams That Are Not By The Author of Watership Down

Recently I finished a checklist of the writings of Richard Adams (1920-2016), the author of Watership Down and many other books. My checklist accounts for the first editions of his books, short stories, juvenilia, nonfiction, and a selection of interviews with him. I was surprised no one had done such a thing before. It will appear in a volume Watership Down: From Animal Fantasy to Ecological Reality, edited by Catherine Butler and Dimitra Fimi, to be published in 2025 by the University Press of Mississippi. 

The process involved disambiguating the publications of other people named Richard Adams from those by the author of Watership Down. Some books have been attributed to him and are demonstrably not by him; yet they appear in various usually-credible bibliographies. 

The most persistent example is the slim anthology Sinister and Supernatural Stories (Ward Lock Educational, 1976). It contains seven stories, one, "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier, and one, "Poor Ash," an original by Richard Adams, who also contributed a two page introduction. There is no biographical information on Adams in the book. The fantasist Richard Adams did anthologies, like  Richard Adams’s Favourite Animal Stories (1981), which included one tale ("The Rabbit's Ghost Story") by Adams, making for a similar situation with the earlier anthology. Research showed that this Richard Adams did other books around the same time for the same and other publishers. A second slim anthology Stories of Adolescence (1979) was edited by this Richard Adams, and likewise contains an original story titled "Dead End." 

Yet another volume edited by this Richard Adams is a collection The Birds and Other Stories (Longman, 1980), by Daphne du Maurier, which includes five stories ("The Birds" having appeared in Sinister and Supernatural Stories) and a new Foreword by du Maurier, and an Editor's Introduction by Adams. This time, however, the title page credits Richard Adams as "Head of the Sixth Form, Lord Williams's School, Thame." Other books edited by Adams in this Longman series include The Valley of Fear (1980) by Arthur Conan Doyle; Typhoon and Other Stories (1980) by Joseph Conrad.

This Richard Adams also was the series editor at Longman Study Texts for some Shakespeare plays, and ones by other authors. I note here just one, Romeo and Juliet, which was edited by Paul Cheetham, of the English Department, Lord Williams's School; so this Richard Adams didn't need to look far to hire an editor. A query to Lord Williams's School about this Richard Adams did not receive a reply. 

Yet with considerable digging, I have ascertained that this Richard [M.] Adams was born near London in 1938. He attended the Orange Hill Boys Grammar School, and St. Catherine's College, Oxford (B.A. 1961; B.Litt 1965). He taught for some years at St. Catherine's, and subsequently as an English teacher at Lord Williams's School. He wrote several school and academic textbooks, including Into Shakespeare (1977), Appropriate English (1984), and Teaching Shakespeare (1985), and a study of Iris Murdoch's The Bells (1990). as well as a Penguin Critical Studies edition on Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (1991), among others. A keen concert and festival attendee, he also published A Book of British Music Festivals (1986; see below for flap bio). In 1986 he became Professor of English Language and Literature at California State University in Sacramento, and later Adjunct Professor, English Literature, at Ramkhamhaeng University in Thailand. He is currently retired and lives in Bangkok. 

 Richard Adams (b. 1938) flap bio 1986

 

There is another Richard Adams (b. 1940) who, in the 1970s and 80s, wrote on Christian subjects, So God Said to Me ... (1978), Dear God--Dear George (1980), Seen God Lately?(1982), Signs of Life (1985), and Visions and Voices (1988).