Aldous Huxley

   

Aldous Huxley
Enlarge
Aldous Huxley

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.

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. 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 he suffered an illness which seriously damaged his eyesight. His near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I. Once his eyesight recovered, he read English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties.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 Hindu 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 thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Lewis Mumford and Huxley's friend Gerald Heard (and, in some ways, Buckminster Fuller). 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

Two film version's of Huxley's works were made; 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

Short stories

  • Limbo (1920)
  • Mortal Coils (1922)
  • Brief Candles (1930)
  • Two or Three Graces
  • Little Mexican

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

  • Along The Road (1925)
  • Jesting Pilate (1926)
  • Beyond the Mexique Bay

Essays

Philosophy

  • The Perennial Philosophy (1944)

Children's literature

  • The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)

Collections

  • Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)

External links

 Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Aldous Huxley.







it:Aldous Huxley da:Aldous Huxley de:Aldous Huxley es:Aldous Huxley fr:Aldous Huxley he:אלדוס האקסלי pl:Aldous Huxley pt:Aldous Huxley ru:Хаксли, Олдос fi:Aldous Huxley sv:Aldous Huxley th:อัลดัส ฮักซเลย์

Retrieved from "http://www.centipedia.com/articles/Aldous_Huxley"

This page has been accessed 1049 times. This page was last modified 17:32, 26 Nov 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).