Aldous Huxley
born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey,
Eng.
died Nov. 22, 1963, Los Angeles
English novelist and critic gifted with an
acute and far-ranging intelligence. His
works were notable for their elegance, wit,
and pessimistic satire.
Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the
prominent biologist T.H. Huxley and was the
third child of the biographer and man of
letters Leonard Huxley. He was educated at
Eton, during which time he became partially
blind owing to keratitis. He retained enough
eyesight to read with difficulty, and he
graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in
1916. He published his first book in 1916
and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from
1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself
largely to his own writing and spent much of
his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when
he settled in California.
Huxley established himself as a major
author in his first two published novels,
Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923);
these are witty and malicious satires on the
pretensions of the English literary and
intellectual coteries of his day. Those
Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point
(1928) are works in a similar vein. Huxley’s
deep distrust of 20th-century trends in both
politics and technology found expression in
Brave New World (1932), a nightmarish vision
of a future society in which psychological
conditioning forms the basis for a
scientifically determined and immutable
caste system. The novel Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) continues to shoot barbs at the
emptiness and aimlessness experienced in
contemporary society, but it also shows
Huxley’s growing interest in Hindu
philosophy and mysticism as a viable
alternative. Many of his subsequent works
reflect this preoccupation, notably The
Perennial Philosophy (1946).
Huxley’s most important later works are
The Devils of Loudun (1952), a brilliantly
detailed psychological study of a historical
incident in which a group of 17th-century
French nuns were allegedly the victims of
demonic possession; and The Doors of
Perception (1954), a book about Huxley’s
experiences with the hallucinogenic drug
mescaline. The author’s lifelong
preoccupation with the negative and positive
impacts of science and technology on
20th-century life make him one of the
representative writers and intellectuals of
that century.
