"To Juliet and Rosamund, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon"
—Dedication, Watership Down
"Master Rabbit I saw" —Walter de la Mare
—Line quoted in Watership Down;[10] the poem can be seen as a possible source of inspiration.
The story began as tales that Richard Adams told his young daughters Juliet and Rosamund during long car journeys. He recounted in 2007 that he "began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of [his] head, as [they] were driving along".[6][11] The daughters insisted he write it down—"they were very, very persistent". After some delay he began writing in the evenings and completed it 18 months later.[11] The book is dedicated to the two girls.[12]
Adams's descriptions of wild rabbit behaviour were based on The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), by British naturalist Ronald Lockley.[13][14] The two later became friends, embarking on an Antarctic tour that became the subject of a co-authored book, Voyage Through the Antarctic (A. Lane, 1982).[13]
In his autobiography, The Day Gone By, Adams wrote that he based Watership Down and the stories in it on his experiences during Operation Market Garden, the Battle of Arnhem, in 1944. The character of Hazel, the leader of the group of rabbits, was modelled on Adams's commanding officer, Major John Gifford. He gave the warrior Bigwig the personality of Captain Desmond Kavanagh, who is buried at the Airborne Cemetery in Oosterbeek, The Netherlands.[15][16] [17]
Watership Down was rejected seven times before it was accepted by Rex Collings.[18] The one-man London publisher Collings wrote to an associate, "I've just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I'm mad?" The associate did call it "a mad risk," in her obituary of Collings, to accept "a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but," she continued, "it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive."[19] Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered."[11] Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave Watership Down its title.[20] There was a second edition in 1973.
Macmillan USA, then a media giant, published the first U.S. edition in 1974 and a Dutch edition was also published that year by Het Spectrum.[3][21]
