Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism . By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank.
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third son of the writer and professional herbalist Leonard Huxley by his first wife, Julia Arnold, the niece...
Created by dipity on Jan 23, 2008
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Aldous Huxley died in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County
Island (ISBN 0-06-008549-5) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that was first published in 1962. It is the account of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist and would-be poet who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, which bears some similarities to Sri Lanka, though geographical references in the novel place it in the archipelago west of Sumatra. Island is Huxley's utopian foil to his dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World and was the last novel before his death in 1963. In a foreword written twenty years after the original publication of Brave New World, Huxley wrote:Island explores many of the themes and ideas that interested Huxley in the Post World War II decades, and were the subject of many of his nonfiction books of essays, Including Brave New World Revisited, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Some of these themes and ideas include overpopulation, ecology, modernity, democracy, mysticism, entheogens, and somatotypes.Common...
The Genius and the Goddess is a novel by Aldous Huxley that was first published in 1955. It is the fictional account of John Rivers, a student physicist in the 1920s who was hired out of college as a laboratory assistant to Henry Maartens.Henry Maartens is a Nobel prize winning physicist; but socially awkward. Only through the ministrations of his young wife Katy and a negro housekeeper, Beluah, are their children and household cared for to any great degree.In 1921 John Rivers, piously sheltered by his widowed mother, and a newly minted PhD, is employed as a lab assistance to Henry. He is invited to live in Henry's home. Soon Rivers finds himself the object of infatuation by the Maartens' 15 year old daughter, Ruth. Katy has to leave for a time to care for her dying mother.In her mother's absence Ruth acts out her "love" for Rivers, which he turns aside.Katy returns because the stress of her absence has made her husband Henry deathly ill. She herself has lost her "vigor," to the point...,
The Devils Of Loudun, a non-fiction book by Aldous Huxley, was first published in 1952. It is a historical account of demonic possession, superstition and religious fanaticism in seventeenth-century France, based on events which took place in the small town of Loudun in Poitou.Urbain Grandier was a priest burned at the stake at Loudun, France on August 18 1634. He was accused of seducing an entire convent of Ursuline nuns and of being in league with the devil. Grandier was probably too promiscuous and too insolent to his peers. He had antagonised the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, when he rejected her offer to become the spiritual advisor to the convent. He faced an ecclesiastical tribunal and was acquitted.It was only after he had publicly spoken against Cardinal Richelieu that a new trial was ordered by the Cardinal. He was tortured, found guilty and executed by being burnt alive but never admitted guilt. Huxley touches on aspects of the multiple personality...
Ape and Essence is a novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1948. It is set in a dystopia, similar to Brave New World, Huxley's more famous work. It is largely a satire of the rise of large-scale warfare and warmongering in the 20th century, and presents a pessimistic view of the politics of mutually assured destruction. The book makes extensive use of surrealist imagery, depicting humans as apes who, as a whole, will inevitably commit suicide. The book starts off in Hollywood with two movie producers who rescue a script from destruction. They are intrigued, and drive to Los Angeles County's high desert to find its author. They arrive at a remote and isolated old ranch, a solitary homestead in a surreal setting. (Huxley's evocative prose is actually an exact description of his own desert home, where he sits, writing.) They interact with the home's inhabitants, learning that the script's author died suddenly, six weeks ago. The rest of the book is the rescued script "Ape and Essence,"...,
After Many a Summer is a novel by Aldous Huxley. Originally published in 1939, it tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire fearing his impending death. The novel was retitled After Many a Summer Dies the Swan when published in the USA. This satire explores several philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in his final novel Island. The title is taken from the Lord Tennyson poem "Tithonus" and about a figure from Greek mythology to whom Zeus gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The action revolves around a few main characters brought together by the Hollywood millionaire, Jo Stoyte. Each character represents a different philosophy of living life. Mr. Propter believes: This is most akin to Huxley's personal beliefs which he cultivated and refined throughout his life and novels. Though other characters achieve conventional success, and or happiness, only Mr. Propter does so without upsetting anyone or creating evil. Stoyte, in his sixties and...
Eyeless in Gaza is a dense novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1936. The title originates from a phrase in John Milton's Samson Agonistes. Its chapters are not ordered chronologically. Aldous Huxley biographer Sybille Bedford claims in her fictive memoir Jigsaw that the novel's characters Mary Amberley, a drug addict, and her daughter, were partly inspired by her own experiences with her morphine-addicted mother and herself, known to Huxley because they were neighbors in the south of France. ...
Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1932. Set in London in 2540 (or AF 632), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society. Huxley answers this novel with a reassessment in his 1958 non-fiction text, Brave New World Revisited, also summarized below. The world the novel describes is a utopia, albeit an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex and drug use, especially the use of soma, a powerful drug taken to escape pain and bad memories through hallucinatory fantasies. Additionally,...,
Those Barren Leaves is a satirical novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1925. Stripping the pretensions of those who claim a spot among the culturally elite, it is the story of Mrs. Aldwinkle and her entourage, who are gathered in an Italian palace to relive the glories of the Renaissance. For all their supposed sophistication, they are nothing but sad and superficial individuals in the final analysis. This 1920s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Antic Hay is a comic novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1923. The story takes place in London, and depicts the aimless or self-absorbed cultural elite in the sad and turbulent times following the end of World War I. The book follows the lives of a diverse cast of characters in bohemian, artistic and intellectual circles. It clearly demonstrates Huxley's ability to dramatise intellectual debate in fiction and has been called a "novel of ideas" rather than people. It expresses a mood of mournful disenchantment and reinforced Huxley's reputation as an iconoclast. The book was condemned for its cynicism and for its immorality because of its open debate on sex. The novel was banned for a while in Australia and burned in Cairo. Superficially the story follows one Theodore Gumbril in his invention of Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes, trousers which contain a pneumatic cushion in the seat. Gumbril's quest for love occasionally makes him resort to utilizing "The Complete Man" which is a...
Mortal coils is an archaic term, meaning the activities and troubles of life. The stories themselves concern themselves with some sort of trouble, normally of an amorous nature, and often ending with disappointment. ...
Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley. It was published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story of a house party at ‘Crome’ where there is a gathering of bright young things. We hear some of the history of the house from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. Our hero, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.Based on Garsington, a house where many authors like Huxley and TS Eliot were contemporaries.
Aldous Huxley was born
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