Aldous Huxley
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Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963) was a British writer. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry and travel writing. Through his novels and essays, Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social morés, societal norms and ideals, and possible misapplications of science in human life. While his earlier concerns might be called "humanist," ultimately, he became quite interested in "spiritual" subjects like parapsychology and mystically based philosophy, which he also wrote about. By the end of his life and afterwards, Huxley's best writings achieved a broad fame and influence.
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Biography
Early years
Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the son of the writer Leonard Huxley by his first wife, Julia Arnold; and grandson of the famous proponent of Darwin, Thomas Huxley. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist also noted for his evolutionary theories. Huxley understandably excelled in the areas he took up professionally, for on his father's side were a number of noted men of science, while on his mother's were people of literary accomplishment.
Huxley was a lanky, delicately framed child who was gifted intellectually. He began his learning in his father’s well-equipped botanical laboratory (his father was a professional herbalist) and continued in the school (named Hillside) which his mother ran for several years until she became terminally ill. From the age of nine, Aldous was then educated in the British boarding-school system. He took readily to the handling of ideas.
His brother Julian died in 1908, when Aldous was only in his teens, and his sister Roberta died of an unrelated incident in the same month. Three years later Aldous suffered an illness which seriously damaged his eyesight. His near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I. Once his eyesight recovered, he was able to read English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Huxley's initial interest in literature was primarily intellectual. While he was noted for his personal kindliness, only considerably later (some say under the influence of such friends as D.H. Lawrence) did he heartily embrace feelings as matters of importance in his evolving personal philosophy and literary expression.
Following his education in literature at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry. But never desiring a career in administration (or in business), Huxley's lack of inherited means propelled him into applied literary work.
Huxley had completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. He wrote great novels on dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (e.g. Eyeless in Gaza). Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.
Middle years
During World War I, he spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle, but remained friendly with the Morrells. He married Maria Nys, whom he had met at Garsington.
Huxley moved to Llano, California in 1937, but like his friend the philosopher Gerald Heard who accompanied him, Huxley was denied citizenship since he refused to ascribe his pacifism to religious beliefs. In 1938 he befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He became a Vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and he also introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle.
Later years
He started meditating and became a vegetarian. Thereafter, his works were strongly influenced by mysticism and his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Huxley's psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in a poem by William Blake) and Heaven and Hell. The title of the former became the inspiration for the naming of the rock band, The Doors. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies. During the 1950s, Huxley's interest in psychical research grew keener. His wife, Maria, died of breast cancer in 1955, and in 1956 he re-married, to Laura Archera (Huxley).
In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer. In the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen institute. His ideas were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. At a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley said: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."
Huxley's views on the proper roles of science and technology (as he portrayed these, say, in Island ) are akin to some other noted English and American thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Lewis Mumford and Huxley's friend Gerald Heard (and, in some ways, Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher). Clearly, these men found descendants in some significant movers of a younger generation, e.g., Stewart Brand.
Death and afterwards
On his deathbed, unable to speak, he made a written request to his wife for "LSD, 100 µg, i.m." She obliged, and he died peacefully the following morning, November 22, 1963 (the same day as John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis).
Films
Huxley did a good deal of work either directly for the film or television screen, or (novels which were) adapted to film or television. For instance, he wrote the original screenplay for Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland, and there were two productions of Brave New World, one of Point Counterpoint, one of Eyeless in Gaza, one of Ape and Essence. Director Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, starring Vanessa Redgrave, is adapted from Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, and a 1990 made-for-television film adaptation of Brave New World was directed by Burt Brinckerhoff.
Selected works
Novels
- Crome Yellow (1921)
- Antic Hay (1923)
- Those Barren Leaves (1925)
- Point Counter Point (1928)
- Brave New World (1932)
- Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
- After Many a Summer (1939)
- Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
- Ape and Essence (1948)
- The Devils of Loudun (1952)
- The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
- Island (1962)
Short stories
Poetry
- The Burning Wheel (1916)
- Jonah (1917)
- The Defeat of Youth (1918)
- Leda (1920)
- Arabia Infelix (1929)
- The Cicadias and Other Poems (1931)
Travel writing
Essays
- The Olive Tree
- The Art of Seeing (1942)
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
- The Doors of Perception (1954)
- Heaven and Hell (1956)
- Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Philosophy
- The Perennial Philosophy (1944)
Biography
- Grey Eminence
Children's literature
- The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
Collections
- Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
External links
- SomaWeb -- Extensive Aldous Huxley bibliography and links to online material
- Crome Yellow online text at Project Gutenberg
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