Richard Adams, Whose Novel ‘Watership Down’ Became a Phenomenon, Dies at 96

Richard Adams, the British novelist who became one of the world’s best-selling authors with his first book, “Watership Down,” a tale of rabbits whose adventures in a pastoral realm of epic perils explored Homeric themes of exile, courage and survival, died on Saturday. He was 96.

His daughter confirmed his death, the BBC and other British news organizations reported. No other details were given.

For much of his life, Mr. Adams was an anonymous civil servant in London who wrote government reports on the environment. But he was also an unpublished dabbler in fiction, an amateur naturalist and a father who made up rabbit stories to entertain his two young daughters on long drives in the country.

When he was 50, at their urging, he began turning his stories into a book intended for juveniles and young adults, writing after work and in the evenings. It took two years. Set in the Berkshire Downs, where he had grown up, a quiet landscape of grassy hills, farm fields, streams and woodlands west of London, “Watership Down” was a classic yarn of discovery and struggle.

Facing the destruction of their underground warren by a housing development, a small party of yearling bucks led by a venturesome rabbit named Hazel flees in search of a new home. They encounter human beings with machines and poisons, snarling dogs and a large colony of rabbits who have surrendered their freedoms for security under a tyrannical oversize rabbit, General Woundwort.

The pioneers realize that founding a new warren is meaningless without mates and offspring. With a sea gull and a mouse for allies, they raid Woundwort’s stronghold, spirit away some of his captive does and confront his forces in a pitched battle in defense of their new warren on Watership Down.

It was a timeless allegory of freedom, ethics and human nature. Beyond powers of speech and intellect, Mr. Adams imbued his rabbits with trembling fears, clownish wit, daring, a folklore of proverbs and poetry, and a language called Lapine, complete with a glossary: “silflay” (going up to feed), “hraka” (droppings), “tharn” (frozen by fear), “elil” (enemies).

Despite its originality, the book had an unpromising start, rejected by literary agents and publishers. But in 1972 a small house, Rex Collings Ltd., printed a first edition of 2,500 copies. British critics raved, comparing the book to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and to the fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien, Jonathan Swift and A. A. Milne. A year later, Penguin issued the novel in its Puffin Books children’s series.

Mr. Adams readily acknowledged criticisms that “Watership Down” borrowed much rabbit lore from R. M. Lockley’s nonfiction study “The Private Life of the Rabbit” (1964). But the authenticity of Mr. Adams’s book as an anthropomorphic fantasy with classic motifs was not challenged, and in Britain it won the Carnegie Medal in Literature in 1972 and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 1973.

In 1974, Macmillan published the first United States edition. American reviews were mixed.

Peter Prescott gave it a glowing review…