It’s the birthday of Richard Adams (1920-2016, #nicelonglife), whose novel Watership Down (1972) about a colony of rabbits searching for a new home was an instant bestseller and ultimately sold more than 50 million copies.

Adams was born in Wash Common, Berkshire, England, and spent his childhood exploring the Berkshire Downs, where he would one day set the novel. He started studying at Oxford but took a break to serve with an airborne company in the Royal Army Service Corps during WWII. He finished his history degree at Oxford in 1948, married in 1949, and settled into a civil service career with the Ministry of Housing and Local Government—probably exactly as exciting as it sounds.

Adams and his wife had two daughters, and once on a car trip Adams began making up a story about rabbits to entertain them; it took him two weeks to tell the full story the first time. His daughters begged him to write the story down, which he started to do—at the age of 50. (Gasp.) The story, which covers no more than eight miles, is nonetheless a dark adventure of epic proportions, exploring themes of freedom and survival. While Adams’ rabbits were of course anthropomorphized—they speak a language called Lapine—they otherwise behaved much like wild rabbits, and Adams drew heavily on R.M. Lockley’s nonfiction work, The Private Life of the Rabbit, handily published in 1964 just a couple years before Adams started his novel.

The novel, though published for adults, won two children’s awards, the Carnegie Medal in Literature and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Reviews were largely fantastic, and the book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for eight months. If you haven’t read it, do.

Adams left the civil service in 1974 and wrote full time. Among his other novels are Shardik (1974), about a religion founded on a giant bear; The Plague Dogs (1977), about escaped dogs that might be carrying the bubonic plague; Traveller (1988), about Robert E. Lee’s horse; Tales from Watership Down (1996); and Daniel (2006), about a slave who becomes an abolitionist.

Adams also wrote nonfiction, including an autobiography, The Day Gone By (1990), in which Adams says, “I can’t remember ever to have done anything—anything at all—more delightful than walking on the crest of the Downs, looking away to the purple, heat-rimmed edge of the horizon.”

Have a Thursday suffused with the beauty of whatever nature is at hand and stay scrupulously honest to the data.