Douglas Adams

British sci-fi writer known for his wacky "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a 1979 cult favorite. .It was turned into a book, which sold 14 million copies around the world, and later into a television series. Galaxy had several sequels, including "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," "Life, the Universe and Everything" and "So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish." His "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" embraces time travel, ghostly possession, quantum mechanics, musical theory, computer modeling, cellular communications and other galaxies. At one point his philosophy supplied the answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything." The answer was 42. In 1998, Douglas released a game for the computer called Starship Titanic. The game helped to divert the author from a novel-in-progress that wasn't working, allowing for "a bit of mental crop rotation." Adams' PC game was not his first venture into the world of multimedia. In the early '80s, he produced "Hitchhiker" as both a radio and TV show and also released it as a text-only computer game for a company dubbed Infocom. Born in Cambridge, England, in 1952 and educated at Cambridge University, Adams began his career as a writer and script editor at the BBC, including work on BBC TV's "Doctor Who." Adams, 6’ 5" tall, married Jane Belson, a lawyer, in 1991. Living in Santa Barbara since 1999, they had a daughter, Polly. He died of a heart attack on 11 May 2001 at age 49, Santa Barbara, CA. Link to Wikipedia biography