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). 

Richard Adams on THE SILMARILLION

The fact that Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was one of the first reviewers of The Silmarillion on its publication in 1977, seems to have long escaped Tolkienists, and Tolkien bibliographers. The review is not cited in Richard C. West's impressive Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (revised edition 1981), nor in Judith A. Johnson's J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism (1986), nor in a handful of subsequent resources that I casually checked. But the review happened. It was published (pp. 85-86) in the November/December 1977 issue (out October 1st) of Quest, a short-lived (1977-1981) magazine published in the U.S. by the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation. 

Adams felt he had been granted "one of the greatest literary privileges and experiences of my life to be among the first, outside of the departed author’s circle, to read The Silmarillion." Yet he complained that: "I have been very seriously hindered indeed (I’m hopping mad, actually) because my proof copy lacks the most important map, the index of names, and the appendix on Quenya and Sindarin.  This is crippling."

By these omissions, Brian Henderson has noticed that the details match with the proof copies circulated by Houghton Mifflin. (See Brian's comments here.)

But the lack of those paratexts didn't really hurt Adams's appreciation for the book itself. Here follows a selection of Richard Adams's comments.

O mighty Tolkien! Prince of fantasists! How shall we find words rightly to praise thy nobility of conception, faultless consistency of narrative, and superb fecundity of invention?  

When I was asked to review The Silmarillion, I thought, “Ah, barrel-scraping, no doubt.”  . . . Usually these are dredged-up bits and pieces, well below the standard of the great work. The Silmarillion is not. It is, in my view, greater and more satisfying than both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The form of The Silmarillion is not a romantic novel, like its forerunners, but a sort of Elvish Bible. The general “feel” most resembles that of the Old Testament. Dialogue and invididual character have about the same degree of importance that they have in the Old Testament—that is to say, characters appear and vanish, subordinate to history and narrative flow as they are not in Lord of the Rings.

The style is most like Malory, the greatest fantasist of all—a kind of simple, stately, half-archaic prose, eminently clear and readable. Like Malory too is the flow and the feeling that a huge plan is being worked out. . . . Some critics may feel this is eclectic. I can imagine no other style or treatment appropriate to such a theme.

Many characters and places have two and sometimes even three names each. . . . Tolkien here is “doing his thing,” if you like it. Personally, I could unravel this stuff with delight all day and all night.

It's a pity that Adams's review hasn't been more widely known, especially back in 1977 when reviews of the book in important venues weren't very favorable. I know Tolkien bibliographer Richard C. West would have been delighted by Adams's review.