Aldous Huxley Biography

Aldous Huxley's full name is Aldous Leonard Huxley. He was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was a novelist and critic from England who possessed a keen and wide-ranging intellect. His work was distinguished by its elegance, wit, and pessimistic satire. He was most known for his novels, like Brave New World, set in a dystopian London; non-fiction publications, such as The Doors of Perception, which describes drug experiences; and a wide set of writings.

Huxley was a satirist, a humanist, and a pacifist. He developed an interest in spiritual topics such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, specifically universalism in the later part of life. Huxley was largely regarded as one of the preeminent intellectuals of his period. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.

He went on to write numerous more popular satire books before publishing his most famous work, “Brave New World”. This book was widely recognized as the finest book of the twentieth century, with a grim vision of the future. Huxley came to the USA in 1937 and continued to write novels, nonfiction, screenplays, and essays for the rest of his life. He died of cancer in 1963 in Los Angeles, California.

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Aldous Huxley Education & Early Life

Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the 3rd son of Leonard Huxley, who was also a writer and schoolmaster, and editor for Cornhill Magazine. His grandfather, T. H. Huxley, was a prominent biologist and naturalist who was an early supporter of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. His mother, Julia, was a descendent of English poet Matthew Arnold. Julian and Andrew Huxley were Huxley's elder brothers, who became excellent biologists in their adulthood, and Huxley also envisioned a future career in science from childhood. Noel Trevelyan Huxley, Aldous's other brother, committed suicide after suffering from clinical depression. His mother died of cancer in 1908, and he was blinded by the disease keratitis punctata in 1911. Huxley began studying in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory before his admission at Malvern's Hillside School. He went on to Eton College after Hillside. In 1908, when he was 14 years old, his mother died. Huxley enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, to study English Literature in October 1913. He willingly agreed to join the British Army in the Great War in January 1916 but was turned down due to his half-blindness in one eye. His vision eventually improved to a degree. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916 and received his BA with First Class honours in June of that year.

Aldous Huxley Works & Career

Huxley earned a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University, where he studied English literature with the aid of a magnifying lens and pupil-dilating eye drops, despite the challenges of his youth. When he was 17 years old, he wrote his first novel and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a professional writer and social satirist. Antic Hay (1923), Crome Yellow (1921), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1926) were his first published works, all societal satires (1928). Aldous Huxley Brave New World was the sixth novel and first dystopian work. He also contributed to publications in the 1920s (Vanity Fair and British Vogue).

He also began to compose poetry, and in 1916, the same year he graduated with honours, he published his first book, The Burning Wheel, a collection of poems. Huxley began work on his novel Crome Yellow, a parody of the intelligentsia and his experiences at Garsington, in the middle of all of these professional and personal changes. Although the book's release in 1921 enraged many of Huxley's Garsington acquaintances, it established Huxley as a significant writer and allowed him to follow his literary ambitions. Huxley wrote the commercially successful books Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928) while travelling across Europe with his family for the following three years. These novels, like Chrome, were satires of current society and conventional morality. However, Huxley's best work was yet to come. Huxley takes the topic of evil in Brave New World considerably more seriously than he has in the past. The satirist was evolving into a social philosopher. Then he left England and moved to California.

Huxley engaged himself in the study and practice of mysticism at his new home. On the Backdrop of World War II, his new philosophical approach shaped his novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936), which promoted pacifism. The Swan After Many a Summer Dies (1939) makes the case for materialism's emptiness. Huxley gradually drifted away from his early satirical tone and toward mystical writings. Huxley's non-fictional expressions of his interests, including experimenting with drugs, can be seen in The Doors of Perception (1954) and The Perennial Philosophy (1945). 

Huxley wrote screenplays for cinematic adaptations of literary classics such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Alice in Wonderland while living in Los Angeles. He had continued writing fiction as well, including Ape and Essence (1948), a futuristic novel set in Los Angeles after a nuclear war. Huxley used historical events to explore what he believed to be organized religion's hypocrisy in Grey Eminence (1941) and The Devils of Loudun (1952). In addition to his fiction and screenplays, he was continuously planning and writing biographies, articles, and other non-fiction books during this time.

Island (1962), Huxley's final novel, returns to the idea of the future that he explored so clearly in Brave New World. Huxley's later novel, in which he attempted to portray a hopeful image of the future, fell short of expectations. A series of essays addressing the topics of his early novel, Brave New World Revisited, demonstrates a more successful reconsideration of future (and current) social challenges.

Literary Style of Aldous Huxley

In Aldous Huxley Books, Huxley was able to use low-key ironic humour and wit in his novels, plays, poetry, travelogues, and essays. His prose, however, was not without poetic flourishes; these appeared in his essay "Meditation on the Moon," which was a metaphoric reflection on what the moon symbolizes in both a scientific and an artistic context, as an attempt to restore his family's intellectual traditions, which included both poets and scientists.

Huxley's fiction and nonfiction writings sparked debate. They were praised for their scientific rigour, detached irony, and diverse ideas. His early books satirized the English upper class's frivolous character in the 1920s, while his later novels dealt with moral difficulties and ethical dilemmas in the face of progress, as well as the human quest for purpose and fulfillment. In reality, his novels become more sophisticated with time. The tension between social stability,  individual freedom, and happiness in an ideal society was examined in Brave New World (1932), while Eyeless in Gaza (1936) saw an Englishman marked by cynicism turn to Eastern philosophy to break through his jadedness.

Aldous Huxley Family 

In 1919, he moved further in his personal life by marrying Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, at Garsington. The following year, she gave birth to their son, Matthew. Huxley, his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard came to Hollywood in 1937. Laura Huxley, Huxley's 2nd wife, married him in 1956. She later wrote a biography of their time together and named it This Timeless Moment (1968). Huxley applied for citizenship in the United States after World War II. His application was consistently denied because he refused to state that he would take up arms to defend the United States. He claimed a philosophical approach rather than a religious objection, therefore the McCarran Act did not apply to him. His application was rejected. Nonetheless, he remained in the nation, declining the Macmillan government's offer of a Knight Bachelor in 1959.

Death and Legacy

Huxley died of cancer on November 22, 1963, in California. Huxley's death was little reported in the press at the time. The shock of President John F. Kennedy's assassination overshadowed news of the writer's death. In 1939, the University of Edinburgh awarded Huxley the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for his novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In 1959, he won the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award of Merit and Gold Medal, as well as an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of California. A year before his death, the British Royal Society of Literature awarded him the honor of Companion of Literature.

Aldous Huxley was a British novelist who had written over 50 books as well as poems, short stories, articles, philosophical treatises, and screenplays. His writing, particularly his most famous and often controversial novel, Brave New World, has functioned as a social critique of the contemporary era's faults. Huxley also had a successful screenwriting career and was a key figure in the American counterculture. Huxley was regarded as an intellectual among humanists. Despite the fact that his financial circumstances forced him to pump out articles and books, his superior thinking and writing gained him high regard. Aldous Huxley Books were regularly assigned reading in American colleges and universities' English and modern philosophy courses. He was one of the "Leaders of Modern Thought" honorees in Scribner's Publishing's "Leaders of Modern Thought" series of twentieth-century thinkers.