The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in Britain on October 12, 1979, and its author Douglas Adams had begun it as a radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 the year before. The book follows Arthur Dent, a man whose house is knocked down and then, minutes later, whose planet is demolished to make way for a bypass, and who is carried off into space by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the guide of the title. The guide itself is the joke the book is built on: an electronic book, described in the text as having the words don't panic on the cover.
Adams wrote it between jobs. The legend is part of it. It grew. The idea, by his own account, came to him lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, looking up at the stars. He wondered where his guidebook was. He wrote the series late. He kept rewriting the novel for two years, and delivered the last of it so late that the publishers had to set the type from what he handed over, which is one reason the book, the radio series and the later versions of the story all differ.
It sold in the millions. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, which is 42, passed into ordinary speech, and the book grew into a series that Adams called a trilogy in five parts, then into a television series, a stage show, a film and a towel-based following. Adams himself died in 2001 at 49, and the story has been finished since by another writer, from his notes.
What has kept it going is the tone. The book treats the end of the world and the bureaucracy that runs the galaxy with the same calm, deadpan absurdity, and its sentences, and the footnotes, and the jokes about planning offices and pub lunches, are quoted more than its plot. It is a book about the universe that is mostly about England.