Watership Down science fiction writer and conservative social commentator writing in the "National Review", declared that the novel was "pleasant enough, but it has about the same intellectual firepower as Dumbo." He pilloried it further: ""Watership Down" is an adventure story, no more than that: rather a swashbuckling crude one to boot. There are virtuous rabbits and bad rabbits: if that’s allegory, "Bonanza" is an allegory." John Rowe Townsend notes that the book quickly achieved such a high popularity despite the fact that it "came out at a high price and in an unattractive jacket from a publisher who had hardly been
Richard Adams Civil Service to become a full-time author. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975. At one point, Adams served as writer-in-residence at the University of Florida and at Hollins University in Virginia. Adams was the recipient of the inaugural Whitchurch Arts Award for inspiration in January 2010, presented at the Watership Down pub in Freefolk, Hampshire. In 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Winchester. In 1982, Adams served one year as president of the RSPCA. Besides campaigning against furs, Adams wrote "The Plague Dogs" to satirize animal experimentation (as