The book became an immediate success with juvenile and adult audiences when it was first printed in 1972, by Rex Collings Ltd., with.

             many subsequent publishings. The first American publication was in 1975 by Avon Books in New York. This book was reviewed well and it received the Guardian Award and Carnegie Medal for Watership Down. Critics praised him because he successfully entered the world of rabbits without destroying the rabbit way of life; Adams had recreated the rabbits" language, culture, and mythology. One critic, Janet Smith, praised Adams for the action of the novel and making it not only the journey of a group of rabbits "but a movement of creatures who are no less part of nature than we are, and whose humble.

             disasters and migrations have a claim to the attention of men, for all the greater scale of theirs" (Smith in Lesniak, p. 3).

             R.M. Lockley"s The Private Life of the Rabbit was Adams"s primary source in writing Watership Down. This nonfiction book provided such things as information about rabbit sicknesses, their leisure activities, and the various actions of the does in the warren. Adams modeled his characters upon the detailed descriptions given in Lockley"s book. Some of the traits and interactions between the rabbits in the novel seem to have been drawn from the behavior that Lockley observed in his rabbit test subjects. Some examples to support this would be the confrontation between Threarah and General Woundwort. This type of violence between two leaders was clearly expressed in Lockley"s study. His research also said that the stronger male would get more food and the majority of the does, while the weaker male rabbits could not collect food or obtain does easily. However, one major difference between Watership Down and Lockley"s book is that in Watership Down, the male rabbits that left the Sandleford Warren were able to coexist peacefully with one another throughout the journey and even throughout the establishment of the Watership Warren.