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Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Aldous Huxley:
</td></tr>
Born: July 26, 1894
Surrey, England

<tr><th style="text-align: right;">Died:</th><td>November 22, 1963
Los Angeles, California, USA</td></tr>

Occupation(s): Writer; author

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was an English writer who emigrated to the United States, living in Los Angeles until his death in 1963. He was a member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, societal norms and ideals. While his earlier concerns might be called humanist, ultimately, he became quite interested in spiritual subjects like parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, about which he also wrote. By the end of his life, Huxley was considered, in many academic circles, a 'leader of modern thought' and an intellectual of the highest rank.


Contents

Biography

Early years

Aldous Huxley:Family tree
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Family tree

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the son of the writer and professional herbalist Leonard Huxley by his first wife, Julia Arnold; and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent naturalists of the 19th Century, a man known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His brother Julian Huxley was also a noted biologist.

Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when Aldous was fourteen. Three years later Aldous suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years"[1]. Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Following his education 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 completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. His earlier work includes important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza). In Brave New World Huxley protrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. The religions of our day have been replaced by the worship of Henry Ford, marking their calendars in the year of Ford beginning in 1908 when he released his first automobile. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.

Middle years

During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. He married Maria Nys, whom he had met at Garsington. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (1920-2005), who had a career as an epidemiologist.

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria and friend Gerald Heard. At this time too Huxley wrote Ends and Means; in this work he explores the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of 'liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love', they haven't been able to agree on how to achieve it. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta, meditation and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed teachings of the world's great mystics.

During this period he was also able to tap into some Hollywood income using his writing skills, thanks to an introduction into the business by his friend Anita Loos, the prolific novelist and screenwriter. He received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice, 1940, and was paid for his work on a number of other films.

For most of his life since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, his eyesight was poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). Around 1939 Huxley encountered the Bates Method for Natural Vision Improvement and a teacher (Margaret Corbett) who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, relocating from Hollywood to a forty-acre ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, in northernmost Los Angeles County, Huxley claimed his sight improved dramatically as a result of using the Bates Method, particularly utilizing the extreme and pure natural lighting of the Southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without spectacles and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, The Art of Seeing which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK).

Later years

After World War II Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but was denied because he would not say he would take up arms to defend America. Nevertheless he remained in the United States and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government.

During the 1950s, Huxley's interest in the field of psychical research grew keener andhis later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Indeed Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment", famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 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.

In 1955 Huxley's wife, Maria, died of breast cancer and in 1956 he remarried, to Laura Archera, who was herself an author and who wrote a biography of Huxley.

In 1960, Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer and 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 which were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was also invited to speak at several prestigious American universities and at a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley warned: "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." This idea was based on his 1932 novel, Brave New World, and echoed by contemporary writer J. B. Priestley in his 1954 novel, The Magicians.

Films

Notable works include the original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland, two productions of Brave New World, one of Point Counter Point, one of Eyeless in Gaza, and one of Ape and Essence. He was one of the screenwriters for the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1944 version of Jane Eyre with John Houseman. 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 Brinckeroffer.

Selected works

Novels

Aldous Huxley:Island - 1964 Penguin paperback edition. 297 pages
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Island - 1964 Penguin paperback edition. 297 pages

Short stories

Poetry

Travel writing

Essay collections

Philosophy

Biography and nonfiction

Children's literature

Collections

Quotations

Trivia

See also

References

  1. ^ Huxley, Aldous (1939). “biography and bibliography (appendix)”, After Many A Summer Dies The Swan (1st Perennial Classic Ed.). Harper & Row, Publishers, 243.


Works by Aldous Huxley
Novels: Crome Yellow ǀ Antic Hay ǀ Those Barren Leaves ǀ Point Counter Point ǀ Brave New World ǀ Eyeless in Gaza ǀ After Many a Summer ǀ Time Must Have a Stop ǀ Ape and Essence ǀ The Genius and the Goddess ǀ Island ǀ The Crows of Pearblossom

Short Stories : Limbo ǀ Mortal Coils ǀ Little Mexican ǀ Two or Three Graces ǀ Brief Candles ǀ The Young Arquimedes ǀ Jacob's Hands; A Fable ǀ Collected Short Stories
Poetry: The Burning Wheel ǀ Jonah ǀ The Defeat of Youth ǀ Leda ǀ Arabia Infelix ǀ The Cicadias and Other Poems ǀ First Philosopher's Song
Travel writing: Along The Road ǀ Jesting Pilate ǀ Beyond the Mexique Bay
Essays:On the Margin ǀ Along the Road ǀ Essays New and Old ǀ Proper Studies ǀ Do What You Will ǀ Vulgarity in Literature ǀ Music at Night ǀ Texts and Pretexts ǀ The Olive Tree ǀ Ends and Means ǀ Words and their Meanings ǀ The Art of Seeing ǀ Science, Liberty and Peace ǀ Themes and Variations ǀ Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ǀ The Doors of Perception ǀ Heaven and Hell ǀ Adonis and the Alphabet ǀ Collected Essays ǀ Brave New World Revisited ǀ Literature and Science
Philosophy: Ends and Means ǀ The Perennial Philosophy
Biography: Grey Eminence ǀ The Devils of Loudun
Collections: Text and Pretext ǀ ǀ Collected Short Stories

Categories


English essayists | English novelists | English poets | English satirists | English science fiction writers | English short story writers | English travel writers | English vegetarians | Human Potential Movement | Converts to Hinduism | People who have declined a British honour | Psychedelic advocates and proponents | Former students of Balliol College, Oxford | Huxley family | Natives of Surrey | 1894 births | 1963 deaths | Subud

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