wiredforbooks.org: Douglas Adams got the idea for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while hitchhiking through Europe as a teenager. Author of Life, the Universe and Everything, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Adams calls himself a comedy writer who used the science fiction format. Douglas Adams talks with Don Swaim in 1983 about looking at the stars and deciding to write a galactic hitchhiker's guide and being influenced by the writing of P. G. Wodehouse.
In a second Douglas Adams interview, he talks with Don Swaim in 1989 about searching for the Yangtze River dolphin in China, promoting the conservation of wildlife, and his novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
