Influences: Swami Prabhavananda, J. Krishnamurti, F. Matthias Alexander
Influenced: Christopher Isherwood, Michel Houellebecq



Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. 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, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank
Early years
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 English 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 he was fourteen. Three years later he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years". 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. He graduated in 1916 with First Class Honours.
Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name George Orwell) was among his pupils, but was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. 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 portrays 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, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nijs, a Belgian woman 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 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 have not 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. However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that 'he could only understand every third word'. Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.
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).
However, while Huxley undoubtedly believed his vision had improved, other evidence suggests that Huxley may have been fooling himself. In 1952 Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty:
"Then suddenly he faltered—and the truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address—he had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought it closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonizing moment." (p. 241: quotes Bennett Cerf re Huxley's vision in 1952)
On 21 October 1949 Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". His letter to Orwell contained the prediction that: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience". (p. 605:quotes Aldous Huxley re Huxley's opinions in 1949 about the technologies to be employed by governments)

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 and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the psychiatrist Humphrey 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. On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for "LSD, 100 µg, i.m.". According to her account of his death (in her book This Timeless Moment), she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died peacefully at 5:21 pm that afternoon, November 22, 1963. Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of the Irish author C. S. Lewis.

Literary themes
Crome Yellow (1921) attacks Victorian and Edwardian social principles which led to World War I and its terrible aftermath. Together with Huxley's second novel, Antic Hay (1923), the book expresses much of the mood of disenchantment of the early 1920s. It was intended to reflect, as Huxley stated in a letter to his father, "the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the present epoch."
Huxley's reputation for iconoclasm and emancipation grew. He was condemned for his explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction. Antic Hay, for example, was burned in Cairo and in the years that followed many of Huxley's books were received with disapproval or banned at one time or another (similar to D.H. Lawrence's).
Huxley, however, said that a novel should be full of interesting opinions and arresting ideas, describing his aim as a novelist as being 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay'; and with Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley wrote his first true 'novel of ideas', the type of thought-provoking fiction with which he is now associated.
One of his main ideas was pessimism about the cultural future of society, a pessimism which sprang largely from his visit to the United States between September 1925 and June 1926. He recounted his experiences in Jesting Pilate (1926): 'The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards', and it was soon after this visit that he conceived the idea of writing a satire of what he had encountered.".
A widespread fear of Americanization had already existed in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century and Brave New World (1932) can be read as Huxley's support of it. His novel - along with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, helped form the anti-utopian or dystopian tradition in literature and has become synonymous with a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning and control.
He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the Mojave Desert, Southern California to a life of contemplation, mysticism and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs. His suggestions in The Doors of Perception (1954) that mescalin and lysergic acid were 'drugs of unique distinction' which should be exploited for the 'supernaturally brilliant' visionary experience they offered provoked even more outrage than his passionate defence of the Bates method in The Art of Seeing (1942). However, the book went on to become a cult text for the beat generation and the psychedelic Sixties (Huxley was to appear on the sleeve of the Beatles' 'Sergeant Pepper' album).
His last novel, Island, was published in 1962, the year after his Los Angeles home and most of his personal effects had been destroyed in a fire which Huxley said left him 'a man without possessions and without a past'.

Films
Notable works include the original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland (which was rejected because it was too literary ), 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-authored 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
? 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
? Limbo (1920)
? Mortal Coils (1922)
? Little Mexican (U.S. - Young Archimedes) (1924)
? Two or Three Graces (1926)
? Brief Candles (1930)
? Jacob's Hands; A Fable (Late 1930s)
? Collected Short Stories (1957)
Poetry
? The Burning Wheel (1916)
? Jonah (1917)
? The Defeat of Youth (1918)
? Leda (1920)
? Arabia Infelix (1929)
? The Cicadias and Other Poems (1931)
? First Philosopher's Song

Travel writing
? Along The Road (1925)
? Jesting Pilate (1926) The author recounts his experiences travelling through six countries, offering his observations on their people, cultures and customs.
? Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)

Essay collections
? On the Margin (1923)
? Along the Road (1925)
? Essays New and Old (1926)
? Proper Studies (1927)
? Do What You Will (1929)
? Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
? Music at Night (1931)
? Texts and Pretexts (1932)
? The Olive Tree (1936)
? Ends and Means (1937)
? Words and their Meanings (1940)
? The Art of Seeing (1942)
? The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
? Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
? Themes and Variations (1950)
? Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
? The Doors of Perception (1954)
? Heaven and Hell (1956)
? Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
? Collected Essays (1958)
? Brave New World Revisited (1958)
? Literature and Science (1963)

Philosophy
? Ends and Means (1937)
? The Perennial Philosophy (1944) ISBN 0-06-057058-X

Biography and nonfiction
? Grey Eminence (1941)
? The Devils of Loudun (1952)

Children's literature
? The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)

Collections
? Text and Pretext (1933)
? Collected Short Stories (1957)
? Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
Quotations
Aldous Huxley
? On truth: "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations."
? On psychological totalitarianism (1959): "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and 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, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."
? On social organizations: "One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters."
? On heroin "Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time."
? On words: "Words form the thread on which we string our experiences."
? On experience: "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." – Texts and Pretexts, 1932
? After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.- Music at Night, 1931
? "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
? "Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages." Antic Hay, 1923
? "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach."
? "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Trivia
? He was six feet, four-and-one-half inches tall.
? Studied ballet for several years.
? Was George Orwell's French teacher for a term at Eton.
? Is shown on the cover of The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as number 18, in the top left hand corner.
? The upcoming MMOFPS game Huxley, loosely based on Brave New World, is named for him.
? He was "opened" in the Subud religion.
? While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a friend and mentor to Ray Bradbury.
? In October of 1930, the Mystic Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.
? On December 24, 1955, Huxley took his first dosage of LSD.
? Huxley was one of three characters in Peter Kreeft's novel Between Heaven and Hell, the other two being C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. The book describes a conversation between the three men who all died on the same day, as they wait in purgatory.
? Sheryl Crow references Huxley's death in her song, "Run Baby Run", as a way of obliquely referring to another event of 22 November 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
? He is the subject of Igor Stravinsky's serial orchestral piece "Huxley Variations".
? A planet in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga is named after him.
? There are numerous references to "Brave New World" in the Sylvester Stallone movie "Demolition Man," most notably the direct reference made by Stallone's character "John Spartan," and the name of the character played by Sandra Bullock, who was called "Lenina Huxley."
The Devils Of Loudun, a non-fiction book by Aldous Huxley, was first published in 1952. It is a historical account of demonic possession, superstition and religious fanaticism in seventeenth-century France, based on events which took place in the small town of Loudun in Poitou.
Urbain Grandier was a priest burned at the stake at Loudun, France on August 18, 1634. He was accused of seducing an entire convent of Ursuline nuns and of being in league with the devil. Grandier was probably too promiscuous and too insolent to his peers. He had antagonised the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, when he rejected her offer to become the spiritual advisor to the convent. He faced an ecclesiastical tribunal and was acquitted.
It was only after he had publicly spoken against Cardinal Richelieu that a new trial was ordered by the Cardinal. He was tortured, found guilty and executed by being burnt alive but never admitted guilt. Huxley touches on aspects of the multiple personality controversy in cases of apparent demonic possession within this book.
Playwright John Whiting adapted Huxley's book as the play The Devils (1960). Ken Russell directed a feature film adaptation The Devils (1971), starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed. Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an opera, The Devils of Loudun (Die Teufel von Loudun) in 1969.