Richard Adams, who has died aged 96, was the author of Watership Down, the tale of a band of rabbits searching for a new home; his book became one of the publishing sensations of the 1970s and stands comparison with The Wind In The Willows and the Just So Stories as a classic of anthropomorphic writing.
The story grew out of those Adams (then a civil servant) told his two young daughters to ease long car journeys. The manuscript that evolved from these stories was rejected by four publishers and three literary agents before it was accepted in 1970 by the small firm of Rex Collings. It has since been translated into 20 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies.
Although originally intended for children, the book proved equally captivating to an adult readership. Drawing on Ronald Lockley's study The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), Adams underpinned his rabbit Aeneid with a complex bunny civilisation, complete with folklore and language, described by him as having a "wuffy, fluffy sound." But the writing was devoid of sentimental whimsy, and Adams did not shy from depicting nature red in tooth and claw.
The rabbits' characters were drawn from army officers he had known during the Second World War, and though endowed with human virtues retained a natural dignity.
Adams' moral sympathies were as evident as his affinity with nature. In the story, the rabbits flee from an environmental threat created by man and overcome both lotus-eating and totalitarian warrens before bringing democracy to the Down (a genuine location, near Alresford in Hampshire). Adams often said he felt that the book's composition had been guided by God.
Richard George Adams was born on May 9, 1920, at Newbury, Berkshire. He was the youngest by some years of three children, an older brother having died of influenza before he was born.
A solitary child, he was close to his father, an increasingly alcoholic doctor, who taught him to revere nature. An idyllic childhood spent roaming fields and a rather spoilt adolescence were recalled in vivid, unsparing detail in a memoir of his early life, The Day Gone By (1990).
At prep school, Christopher Milne – the original Christopher Robin – was a classmate. Adams then went to Bradfield and in 1938 on up to Worcester College, Oxford, to read history but his studies were interrupted by war service.
Adams was hypersensitive to his own pain and to that of others, a delicacy he ascribed to the shock of seeing Punch beating the Baby at a childhood party. The mention of Christ's Passion or the approach of Easter inevitably reduced him to tears.
Back at Oxford in 1946, he suffered a nervous breakdown after his father's death and had to take his finals from Warneford Mental Hospital after being found in the Provost of Worcester's study with a note pinned to his chest stating that he had committed suicide.
In 1948 he entered the Civil Service, where he served in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. By 1974, when he resigned to write full-time, he had become an assistant secretary in the Department of the Environment, with particular responsibility for clean air.
Adams would subsequently write more than a dozen books, but none approached the success of Watership Down, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1972; by contrast, a sequel published 25 years later, Tales from Watership Down (1996), went virtually unnoticed.
Adams' anthropomorphic skill and rich imagination were still present in work such as Shardik (1974), a story about a bear and his own favourite of his books, and The Plague Dogs (1977), but reviewers felt browbeaten by their didactic style and notices were mixed. His reading public also disapproved of those of his novels which were heavily tinged with a sub-Nabokovian eroticism, notably The Girl In A Swing (1980).
The poor reviews of most of the books pained Adams; one by Craig Brown stated that he would rather have read a book about civil servants written by a rabbit.
Adams had a difficult relationship with the literary press, believing they were jealous of his success, and he nursed feuds, notably against his fellow author A.N. Wilson.
Five years after Wilson had written an unfavourable review of The Girl in A Swing, Adams asked him to justify it when he encountered Wilson at a party.
When the latter pleaded that he could not possibly remember what he had written, Adams recited all 1,000 words of the review from memory. A temporary truce was spoilt by the revelation that Adams fantasised about "dropping turds" on Wilson's head.
Those sent to interview Adams found a lively, generous and vulnerable man, by turns charmingly indiscreet and a curmudgeon. Female journalists who took his fancy were treated to lengthy sexual reminiscences.
Many interviewers noted his belief in the damage that had been caused to him (and others) by the restrictions of class and conventional sexual conduct.
Adams enjoyed the royalties he accrued from Watership Down and from the sales of film rights to a number of his books. For a time he lived as a tax exile at Lhergy-Dhoo on the Isle Of Man, before moving to Whitchurch, Hampshire. There he would often walk across his beloved fields and meadows.
He used some of his wealth to acquire a coat of arms: three rabbits on a green field, holding pens of gold. He also built up a valuable and substantial library of first editions, from which he would often read aloud before writing.
Adams was president of the RSPCA from 1980 until resigning in acrimonious circumstances in 1982. He continued to campaign against vivisection and the fur industry and publicly favoured the legalisation of cannabis.
Richard Adams married, in 1949, Elizabeth Acland, an expert on 18th-century English porcelain. They had two daughters.