Aldous Huxley
1894–1963 8 entries
Biography
Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher, best known for the novel Brave New World. Born in 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, into a family of scientists — his grandfather was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley — he went to Eton, where an eye disease left him nearly blind at sixteen and ended his hopes of a career in medicine. He studied English literature at Oxford and in the 1920s became known for witty satirical novels about the English intellectual world, such as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point.
In 1932 he published Brave New World, the picture of a future society kept content by pleasure, conditioning and drugs, which became one of the great dystopias of the century. In his essays, among them Ends and Means and The Perennial Philosophy, he wrote about pacifism, mysticism and the relation between means and ends. In 1937 he moved to California, where he later described his experiences with mescaline in The Doors of Perception. He died in Los Angeles in 1963, on the same day as President Kennedy.
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