The Hitchhiker

Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England. He was a self-described “strange child” who did not learn to speak until he was four. At first, he wanted to be a nuclear physicist, but ended up attending Cambridge to study English. “When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking across Europe, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought, ‘Somebody ought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to …

…the Galaxy has quite a bit of subliminal messages and thought-provoking observations. Perhaps the most important of these is that the universe actually doesn’t make sense and there’s no point in trying to discover any meaning to it. When looked at from afar, which requires a great deal of imagination, the universe is a ridiculous place and without a substantial amount of insanity, it would quickly become terribly exhausting. Adams makes meaninglessness fun.