Douglas Adams, who died on May 11th aged 49, always claimed he was quite unprepared for the global success of his most famous project, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest, he said.
Starting off in 1978 as a radio series, his picaresque account of mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent's travels through space with his friend Ford Prefect - Virgil to Dent's Dante, according to one reading - became an industry, spawning hit television and stage shows, as well as four books that sold more than 14 million copies worldwide.
The Guide itself was a repository of all knowledge about life, the universe and everything, and had the legend "Don't Panic" written in huge letters on its cover. The phrase "hitchhiker's guide to . . ." entered the language, and the only medium it has not been translated into is film.
Yet, after 20 agonising years in the Hollywood system - Douglas Adams likened the process to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it" - it is one of the many ironies of his early death that the project is now closer than ever to completion.
Indeed, one reason that its author moved to California in 1, after 22 years in north London, was to be closer to the negotiations.
It is something of a commonplace to say that Hitch Hiker's success became a burden for Douglas Adams - and he did struggle against writer's block for the rest of his career - but he nevertheless relished the time and money it provided him with to cultivate his hobbies and obsessions.
He had a huge collection of electric guitars, and would invite rock stars to play at parties in his house; he once performed at Earl's Court with his friends, Pink Floyd.
His interest in ecology led him to work to protect endangered species. His love of technology saw him founding a dot.com company that took the idea of the Guide full circle by launching a service offering real information on life, the universe and everything - via your mobile phone.
After the dot.com crash last year, the company was taken under the protective wing of the BBC, but Douglas Adams still retained his job title of chief fantasist.
Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge. His father was a teacher and his mother a nurse. The family soon moved to the fringes of east London and, when he was five, his parents divorced. His teachers initially thought him educationally subnormal. By the time he went to the direct-grant Brentwood Preparatory School in Essex, however, he had been identified as extremely bright.
Douglas Adams cited the Beatles and Monty Python as key cultural influences, describing as "epiphanous" the moment when he discovered that being funny could be a way in which intelligent people expressed themselves. He thus went to study English at "I briefly did therapy, but realised it is like a farmer complaining about the weather.
Even when Hitch Hiker was aired, there was little indication that it would prove a life-changing event, and he took a job as a BBC producer. Six months later, he resigned to write the second radio series, the novel, the television series - and some episodes of Dr Who. It was a workload all the more remarkable for someone with a legendary reputation for not writing.
By the 1990s, Douglas Adams felt "like a mouse in a wheel", and entered a period of what he called "creative crop rotation". Out of this period came the TV programme, book and CD-Rom Last Chance To See, about a trip he made to Madagascar to find a rare type of lemur. "It is still the thing I am most proud of," he said.
In 1999, he moved to Santa Barbara, California. When in London last year to promote his website, he acknowledged being smitten by fatherhood. In a neat illustration of how far he had come, instead of producing a passport photograph of his six-year-old daughter, Polly, he would open up his laptop, and show her starring in a spoof pop video along with former hero and now friend, John Cleese.
Douglas Noel Adams: born 1952; died, May 2001