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Towel Day just around the corner
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Josh Smith knows where his towel is. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Now that Mother’s Day has passed, another significant calendar date looms: May 25th, celebrated by fans of Douglas Adams all over the world as Towel Day.
Adams, of course, wrote five books in the “trilogy” that began with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in late 1979 and continued throughout the 1980s. As those familiar with the series know, Adams describes how hitchhiking across the universe is not terribly difficult as long as one brings a towel. The towel is described as one of the most useful things in the universe, capable of dozens of functions, and is therefore an important part of the improbably comic world he described.
Adams died very young, in May 2001, and a group of his fans decided to have a day in his honor. The date was chosen as May 25th, and has been kept up ever since.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its companions formed the most popular series of comedic books of the 1980s. Although funny and charming, the books held an undercurrent of pessimism, frequently citing impatience with modern Britain and the Thatcherite model of society, as well as a certain resignation that humans would eventually destroy themselves. Indeed, in the last book, Mostly Harmless, the world is destroyed (again), this time killing off all the major characters.
Enormously prolific during the 1980s, Adams also found time to complete two novels based on his detective hero Dirk Gently: 1987’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul in 1988. These books, as well as to some extent the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, took humorous approaches to the emerging science of Chaos theory which became popularized in that decade.
The fact that his fans continue to celebrate his work not only signifies how beloved the works her produced remain, but how beloved Adams was in his own right. Despite the lunatic nature of the stories he wrote, his overall message was one of sanity and tolerance, couched in the pleasantries of a hilarious and extremely intelligent uncle. Eccentric, brilliant, and possessing a gift for a deft turn of phrase, Adams continues to be celebrated to this day.
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