Adams, Richard (Vol. 5) - Adams, Richard 1920–
Adams, Richard 1920–
Adams, formerly a British civil servant, is the author of the international best seller, Watership Down. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)
Children's literature has a way of becoming adult literature, not when it grows up, but when parents learn how to possess and hence to manipulate the language of their offspring—usually as a substitute for some loss of confidence in their own communicative sets. Lewis Carroll probably realized, better than most, that children's literature seldom pleases children; after all, his tiny Alice has a tendency to fall asleep when being read to out of the big book by her elder sister…. From Aesop to Tolkien, literary history is filled with examples of prolonged adult fascination with children's tales, and there is the faint suggestion that this interest is in part voyeuristic: when the loss of childhood is threatened—by "professional" little leagues, or the vote (and...
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