Aldous huxley biography facts records of death

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in the last years of the nineteenth century, but his work constantly addresses itself to the present moment, forming a link between the world of the high Victorian liberal intellectual and the modern era.

Aldous huxley nationality

His paternal grandfather was the distinguished Darwinian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley — and his maternal great-uncle the equally famous poet and critic Matthew Arnold — His work, in its intelligence, its vivacity, and in the way it constantly pushes back the boundaries of thought, along with its assured grasp of the worlds of science and literature, placed him at the center of English writing in the twentieth century.

Lawrence — , who became a lifelong friend. Despite poor sight resulting from an infection contracted on the playing fields of Eton and that caused temporary blindness, Huxley published his first collection of stories, Limbo, in and his bold and witty satirical first novel, Crome Yellow, in ; both made an immediate impact. Subsequent novels established him as a clever and provocative anatomist of the stuffy old-fashioned world of middle-class England.

His writings were laced with the anger of a younger generation that had lost so many of its number in the war. This iconoclastic phase, during which Huxley supported himself with a flow of essays, articles, and travel books, culminated in his two most substantial novels, Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza The life at Sanary has been memorably captured in the writings of Sybille Bedford b.

In , to the disappointment of some of his readers, the iconoclast was displaced by the moralist as Huxley, alarmed at the direction of world events in the s, threw himself into the antiwar movement, publishing An Enyclopaedia of Pacifism in In he had already published what would prove to be his most famous novel, Brave New World, a dystopian portrait of a world where human beings are mass-produced in test tubes like cars on an assembly line.

The novel expresses his lifelong distaste for "Fordism" and the manipulation of the individual by advertising and political propaganda. Now his nonpartisan political engagement became increasingly pronounced.

Aldous huxley education

In Huxley and his wife, Maria Nys — , left England on a lecture tour of the United States , which turned into a permanent residence after Huxley was offered work as a Hollywood screenwriter, though the work did not agree with him. While living mostly in California, where the light relieved his eyesight problems about which he published a book called The Art of Seeing in , Huxley became increasingly interested in the mystical tradition, Western and Eastern, and published an anthology of its key texts, The Perennial Philosophy But his most famous nonfictional work would prove to be The Doors of Perception , an account of an experiment with mescaline, the result of his desire to explore the limits of human consciousness.

Scientific in aspiration, the book, and its sequel, Heaven and Hell , coming as they did at the start of the s drug culture which Huxley deplored , intensified his fame in the last years of his life when, as an honorary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in , he drew record crowds attracted by his guru status.