Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley an English writer, essayist and philosopher (1894-1963), best known for the dystopian novel Brave New World of 1932. A member of a distinguished scientific and literary family, he wrote satirical fiction, essays on science and society and, in his later years, works of mystical and visionary inquiry.

Family, Education and Early Life

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born at Godalming in Surrey on 26 July 1894. He was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the great-nephew of the poet Matthew Arnold, and he grew up in a family of exceptional intellectual distinction. His mother died when he was fourteen, and his brother Julian became a noted biologist.

He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature and won prizes for poetry. As a boy he suffered an eye inflammation that left him nearly blind, a disability that excused him from military service in the First World War and that shaped the rest of his life, though his sight partially recovered.

He worked briefly as a journalist and schoolmaster and published his first volumes of poetry and stories in the years after the war. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman, and the couple moved in the literary circles of London and later of southern California, becoming friends with many writers, artists and scientists.

Early Fiction and Satire

His early novels established him as a brilliant satirist of English intellectual life. Crome Yellow of 1921, Antic Hay of 1923 and Those Barren Leaves of 1925 are comedies of ideas, crowded with talkative characters, artists and pseudo-philosophers, and they mock the pretensions and aimlessness of the postwar generation.

Point Counter Point of 1928 is a more ambitious work, a novel of many characters whose lives are woven together like themes in music, and it treats passion, jealousy, science and art with a cool and analytical eye. Its technique, built on contrast and counterpoint, was widely admired and imitated.

Brave New World, published in 1932, remains his most famous book. It imagines a future society, sometimes called a World State, in which human beings are produced in hatcheries and conditioned from birth for their assigned roles, and in which contentment is engineered through drugs and pleasure. It gave the genre some of its most durable images.

Brave New World and Its Themes

In Brave New World stability and happiness are bought at the price of freedom, art and family life. Children are decanted from bottles and graded by caste; citizens take a tranquiliser called soma; and any trace of individuality or discontent is treated as a social disease. The novel's power lies in its seductive surface, a world that works precisely because people have been trained to want it.

The book was written partly as a reply to the utopias and scientific romances that had imagined the future as a rational paradise. Huxley saw how comfort, consumer pleasure and technology might enslave as effectively as terror. The figure of the Savage, raised outside the system, becomes the voice of a rejected humanism, and his final defeat gives the story its bitterness.

The novel has been compared with George Orwell's later Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the two are often read as complementary warnings, one of control through pleasure and conditioning, the other of control through fear and surveillance. Huxley himself returned to the theme in Brave New World Revisited, an essay published in 1958, finding the trends he had imagined advancing in the real world.

Essays, Mysticism and Later Work

Huxley was a superb essayist, and his collections, including Proper Studies, Do What You Will, Ends and Means and The Perennial Philosophy, cover science, politics, art, education and religion. He wrote with clarity and wit and was willing to follow an argument wherever it led, even against the assumptions of his own class and time.

In the 1930s and after, he became increasingly concerned with pacifism, with the relation between ends and means, and with the psychology of belief. He moved to California in 1937, wrote for Hollywood, and turned toward spiritual questions. He experimented with mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception in 1954, a book that influenced later debates about consciousness and psychedelic experience.

His later novels, among them After Many a Summer, Ape and Essence and Island, combine fiction with moral and ecological argument. Island of 1962 describes a fictional society that has achieved a humane balance of science, religion and pleasure, offering a positive counterpart to the anti-utopia of Brave New World and showing that his imagination could envision hope as well as warning.

Influence and Legacy

Brave New World made Huxley one of the most quoted authors of the twentieth century, and its phrases and images have entered the wider culture. The book is a standard text in schools and universities, has been adapted for television and film, and is routinely invoked in debates about genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals and consumer society.

His essays and his writings on mysticism influenced a generation of readers interested in consciousness, ecology and the critique of technological society. The title of The Doors of Perception gave a name to a famous American rock band, and his ideas about the uses and dangers of mind-altering substances contributed to later debates on that subject.

He died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, on the same day as President Kennedy, and his passing was largely overshadowed by that event. He is remembered as a writer of extraordinary intellectual range, a satirist, a sceptic and a seeker, whose best work brought wit and moral seriousness to the great questions of science and human freedom.

See also

• Brave New World
• Dystopian fiction
• The Doors of Perception
• Nineteen Eighty-Four