Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) was an English writer and philosopher, the author of some fifty books including novels, essays, travel writing and screenplays. [1] He is best known for Brave New World (1932), a dystopian novel of a technologically managed society, and for later works on mysticism and perception such as The Doors of Perception. [2]
Early life and education
Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, into a family of exceptional intellectual distinction. [1] His grandfather was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the leading Victorian advocate of Darwinian evolution; his brother Julian Huxley became an evolutionary biologist and the first director-general of UNESCO.
He was educated at Eton College, where an illness in adolescence left him with severely impaired eyesight, ending his intention of studying medicine. [1] He went on to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in English literature in 1916. During the First World War his poor vision disqualified him from service, and he worked briefly as a schoolmaster, teaching among others Eric Blair, later known as George Orwell.
Early novels and essays
Huxley established himself in the 1920s with satirical novels of intellectual society, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921) and continuing with Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point (1928), the last of which won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. [1] These books are marked by sharp comedy, wide-ranging discussion of ideas and scepticism about the certainties of the post-war world.
He travelled extensively during this period, living in Italy and France and recording his impressions in essays and travel books that ranged across art, science, religion and politics. [2]
Brave New World
Brave New World, published in 1932, depicts a stable world state in which humans are hatched to order in biological castes, conditioned from infancy to accept their place, and kept content by consumption, casual pleasure and the drug soma. [2] Unlike dystopias built on terror, Huxley's imagines control achieved through comfort and the removal of any reason to object.
He returned to its themes in Brave New World Revisited (1958), a set of essays comparing his fictional projections with the overpopulation, propaganda and pharmacology of the mid-century world. [3]
California, mysticism and later work
In 1937 Huxley moved to the United States, settling in southern California, where he worked intermittently as a screenwriter on films including an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. [1] He became occupied with pacifism and comparative mysticism, an interest reflected in The Perennial Philosophy (1945).
From 1953 he experimented under supervision with mescaline and later LSD, describing the results in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell, works that examine altered perception and became influential far beyond literary circles. [2] His final novel, Island (1962), presents a utopian counterpart to Brave New World. Huxley died of cancer in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963. [1]
Legacy
Huxley's name is permanently attached to the vocabulary of dystopia, and Brave New World is read alongside Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the two central English-language warnings about the modern state. [1] His essays on perception, religion and human potential continue to be cited in debates over biotechnology, consumer culture and the ethics of enhancement.
