Winters is a freelance writer and editor and has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses themes of the hero's journey in Richard Adams's Watership Down.

Throughout prehistory and history, people have told stories of wanderers who, seeking a better life, travel through adversity, danger, and hardship to a new home. Richard Adams's Watership Down is a classic example of this "quest" story, and in his epigrams to the chapters, Adams pays homage to previous literary quests, citing John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur about the quests of noble knights; the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest quest stories known; Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which examines quest myths and stories worldwide; and Walter de la Mare's poem "The Pilgrim," and in the text, he mentions that "Odysseus [the mythical...