Item #913 Watership Down. Richard Adams.
Watership Down

Watership Down

"Oh Hazel! This is where it comes from! I know now--something very bad! Some terrible thing--coming closer and closer."

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, SIGNED BY ADAMS on title page: "Richard Adams / April 1974"

Watership Down "has been called one of the first contemporary crossover hits... [It] is a heroic fantasy about rabbits that was inspired by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as was George Lucas's Star Wars, another crossover phenomenon of the 1970s. Watership Down appealed to the same taste for mythic narrative as Tolkien and, later, Pullman and Rowling. The rabbits' epic adventure is reminiscent of the adventures of Odysseus or Aeneas, and the novel is full of sophisticated allusions to Homer, Virgil, Greek tragedy, the Bible, Shakespeare, and so forth... The author has always maintained that 'Watership Down is not a book for children... it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.'

"Adams's novel proved to be both a commercial and a critical success. Watership Down won Britain's oldest and most prestigious children's literary award, the Carnegie Medal, as well as the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction in 1972... Watership Down has been rightly described as 'one of the original popular culture crossovers: a book that hooked adults and children on such a vast scale that it made publishing history" (Beckett, Crossover Fiction).

New York: Macmillan, 1974. Thick octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with a few spots of soiling and a little wear at spine ends.

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