Watership Down heard of." Fred Inglis, in his book "The Promise of Happiness: Value and meaning in children's fiction", praises the author’s use of prose to express the strangeness of ordinary human inventions from the rabbits' perspective. "Watership Down"'s universal motifs of liberation and self-determination have led to the tendency of minority groups to read their own narrative into the novel, despite the author's assurance (in 2005) that it "was never intended to become some sort of allegory or parable." The author Rachel Kadish, reflecting on her own superimposition of the founding of Israel onto "Watership Down", has remarked "Turns out plenty
Watership Down obituary of Collings, to accept "a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but," she continued, "it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive." Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered." Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave "Watership Down" its title. There was a second edition in 1973. Macmillan USA, then a media giant, published the first U.S. edition in 1974 and a Dutch edition was also published that year by Het Spectrum.