New Douglas Adams Bio to Include Unseen Hitchhikers Guide Material

A new excerpt from a deserted draft of Douglas AdamsHitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel, along with a score of previously unseen material, will be published in an upcoming biography of the author, The Guardian reports.

Biographer Jem Roberts bookThe Froodwill include discarded parts from the firstHitchhikersbook (which was turned into a movie in 2005), as well as sections from the lost draft ofLife, The Universe and Everything, which Roberts says has whole chapters where the characters are doing different things different ideas he never got round to using, [such as] chapters written from Arthur Dents point of view. Roberts foundthe pages amongst a staggering amount of unpublished work stored in Adams archives at St. Johns College in Cambridge.

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While a collection of story fragments and part of an unfinished novel were published posthumously as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002 (Adams died the previous year), those were culled from the authors hard drives. Nobody had ever thought about a paper trail though, Roberts said. Douglas Adams was the king of new technology, and people probably thought hed had a huge bonfire of all his papers. But there are boxes and boxes of notebooks, lots of typescript stuff, paper printed from the computer it was just an enormous job.

The well of Adams work is deep, and The Frood will also feature an alternative original pitch for Hitchhikers Guide, a draft for the second television series and unused material boasting characteristically absurd, grandiose titles like Baggy the Runch and The Assumption of Saint Zalabad.

Roberts did stress, however, that none of this stuff is finished. Its very important to contextualize this material properly and I understand people thinking that this is raw material and he didnt want it to be seen. I spend part of the book asking what Douglas would have wanted but there are so many great Douglas Adams jokes which have been completely air-sealed for the last 20 years. [And] I think its wonderful that we finally get to read some of this stuff.

The Frood is set to be published this fall. While there have been other biographies of Adams, The Frood is the first authorized by the authors estate and family.