BIOGRAPHY:

The British writer and philosopher is famous for his novel “Brave New World,” written in the dystopian genre. He began his career as a humanist and satirist, an opponent of war, but with age he became interested in mysticism and other spiritual issues. At one time he was considered an outstanding intellectual and was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Childhood and youth:

Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Godalming, UK. Both Huxley’s parents belong to the cultural elite. Aldous’s father, Leonard Huxley, was also a writer, and his paternal grandfather was a famous zoologist, popularizer of science, and defender of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Aldous Huxley’s maternal ancestors also left their mark on history. The writer’s great-grandfather Thomas Arnold was a teacher, an expert in antiquity and an educational reformer, and his great-uncle was a poet and literary critic. Aldous Huxley’s brothers, Julian and Andrew, were famous biologists.

Aldous lost his mother at the age of thirteen. A couple of years later, the young man “caught” a certain eye disease, due to which his vision deteriorated greatly. This misfortune turned out to be a bright side when, due to health reasons, Huxley was released from military service just as the First World War was going on.

Much later, in 1943, the writer published the brochure “How to Correct Vision,” where he shared his own experience of vision correction.

Aldous wrote his first novel at a young age – at the age of 17, but this work was not published. Huxley received his education at Oxford, where he studied literature at Balliol College. The final decision to become a professional writer came to him at the age of twenty.

Literature:

Aldous Huxley’s favorite genre is dystopia. In his works, the author describes how a society, captured by technological progress, over time loses the remnants of humanity. The novel Brave New World describes the London of the future. All countries of the Earth are united into one state. Consumption has become a cult, and Henry Ford, the first manufacturer of cheap public cars, has become the new god of the consumer society.

People in the world that Huxley describes are artificially divided into castes. Natural reproduction has been stopped, and new citizens of the “wonderful world” are grown in test tubes. The abilities of children of lower castes are suppressed even at the embryonic stage.

Citizens are trained from an early age to obediently take their assigned place in the caste system. They are “treated” with hypnosis, they are tuned into collectivism, consumption and unconditional acceptance of the values ​​of society.

Another famous book by Huxley, “The Ape and the Entity,” is written in the genre of post-apocalyptic dystopia. The work is a “novel within a novel”, as it begins with two friends finding a script called “The Monkey and the Entity”, which was rejected by the film company.

The characters learn that the scriptwriter recently died, as well as some facts from his unremarkable biography. The rest of the novel is the text of this fictional scenario. The “scenario” describes the future of humanity, which has practically destroyed itself with nuclear weapons and artificially caused epidemics. Civilization and culture were preserved only on the islands of New Zealand, which remained aloof from the world’s apocalyptic processes. The rest of the land is smoking ruins, where crowds of feral people roam.

A group of New Zealand scientists sets off on an expedition to the shores of America, hoping to rediscover this continent. After radiation contamination, new species of plants and animals appeared in America, and the surviving people are building a new totalitarian society on the ruins of civilization.

Based on the novel Brave New World, a film was made in 1998 with Leonard Nimoy and Peter Gallagher. Another film adaptation was made in 1980, directed by Burt Brinkerhoff.

Aldous Huxley also wrote about two dozen stories and short stories, including “Cinthia,” “Young Archimedes,” “Nun for Breakfast” and others.

Personal life:

Aldous Huxley’s first wife, Maria Nys, was from Belgium. From this marriage a son was born, who was named Matthew. The boy studied at Dartington Hall School, and in 1937, along with his entire family, moved from Great Britain to the USA, where he entered the University of California and eventually became a famous epidemiologist.

Aldous’s eyesight continued to decline, and one of the reasons for moving to Los Angeles was that the writer considered the Californian climate more beneficial for his health than the British one. Aldous’s friend, Gerald Gerd, moved to the United States with the Huxley family.

In America, Aldous Huxley reaches a new level of his creativity and begins to ask questions about human essence. The writer makes new acquaintances, among whom is the Indian philosopher Jedda Krishnamurti. Huxley’s passion for mysticism, philosophy and spiritual issues was provoked by communication with this man. However, despite his interest in these topics, Huxley himself called himself an agnostic.

In 1953, Huxley took part in an experiment to study the effect of psychotropic substances on human consciousness. Huxley described this experiment and experience in his essay “The Doors of Perception.” And in Huxley’s correspondence with the researcher who conducted the experiment, the word “psychedelic” was used for the first time. All these new experiences influenced the nature of Huxley’s work.

After Mary’s death in 1955, Aldous Huxley married a second time, to fellow Italian writer Laura Archer.

Huxley’s interest in various states of human consciousness led the writer into further research in the early 1960s. Together with the outstanding American psychiatrist Milton Erickson, Huxley studied altered states of consciousness, hypnosis and trance.

Interesting Facts:

Most of Aldous Huxley’s manuscripts were lost in a fire in his house shortly before the death of the writer himself. Some of the surviving manuscripts are kept in the Stanford University library, and some are kept in the University of California at Los Angeles.

Artist Stuart McMillen created a comic in May 2009 comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, and how our real modern world is similar to the society depicted by both writers. As a result of the comparison, it turned out that our society is moving more along the path proposed by Huxley.

The title of Huxley’s essay on the effects of mescaline on the mind – The Doors of Perception – gave the name to Jim Morrison’s cult band The Doors.

Death:

The cause of Aldous Huxley’s death was laryngeal cancer. The writer died on November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles, on the same day as US President John Kennedy.

At Huxley’s request, his wife injected him with LSD before his death, although doctors protested about this. This injection gave the writer the opportunity to die peacefully, without suffocation or convulsions. Laura Archera admitted this only in 1986, when she gave an interview to the British television company BBC.

Bibliography:

1921 – “Yellow Chrome”
1923 – “The Jester’s Round Dance”
1925 – “These Barren Leaves”
1928 — “Counterpoint”
1932 — “Brave New World”
1936 – “Blind Man in Gaza”
1939 — “After many years”
1943 – “How to Correct Your Vision”
1945 — “Time Must Stop”
1945 – “Eternal Philosophy”
1948 — “The Monkey and the Entity”
1952 — “The Demons of Loudun”
1954 — “The Doors of Perception”
1955 — “The Genius and the Goddess”
1956 — “Heaven and Hell”
1958 — “Return to Brave New World”
1962 — “Island”

Quotes:

• Aldous Huxley owns a lot of famous aphorisms, in particular:
• What if our earth is the hell of some other planet?”
• “Axiom: the more curiosity our new acquaintances arouse, the less they deserve it.”
• “Wandering around in shit is not the best way to get clean.”
• “Music comes second to silence when it comes to expressing the inexpressible.”
• “In art, sincerity is synonymous with talent.”

The best books by Aldous Huxley:

Counterpoint:

Counterpoint (1928) is Aldous Huxley’s major work, describing several months in the life of London’s intellectual elite. There are no main characters or main storyline. Like musical counterpoint, which involves a combination of two or more melodic voices, Huxley’s novel is an interweaving of different destinies, a story about the personal lives of many people who one way or another fall into the writer’s field of vision. They meet in cafes and restaurants, go to high society receptions, quarrel, gossip, and slander. There is no purpose in all this – just meaningless polyphony. This is how Huxley looks at his contemporaries, and today’s reader will certainly hear many familiar voices in this chorus. 4.3 Oh brave new world.

Doors of perception. Heaven and Hell (collection):

The most controversial and popular works of the famous Aldous Huxley. Works that became a kind of intellectual manifesto for fans of the psychedelic culture of the turbulent sixties. They were admired by Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and Jim Morrison. They influenced the minds of hundreds of thousands of “angry young people” who were looking for a new meaning in life. Their meaning and essence is the search for ideal ways to expand consciousness.

Island:

The ideas of the cult “Brave New World” were continued in the last, most mysterious and mystical novel by Aldous Huxley, “The Island”. Conceived by the author as a dystopia, this work turned out to be much larger than the narrow framework of the utopian genre. This truly great philosophical novel is a reflection of modern society. An amazing and strange story of a perfect society of free people on an island lost in the ocean… But one day a person from the outside finds himself in this world of blissful ignorance…

Ape and Essence:

A fantastic dystopia, a kind of warning from the writer about an impending nuclear disaster that will wipe out almost everything from the face of the earth, and on the ruins of the former civilization the survivors will try to build a new society. But this new society will not bring anything good: total control of the Church over the entire life of people, a ban on love, on passion and, as a result, completely perverted relationships between people. And this new society will worship not God, but the Devil named Belial.

Devils of Loudun:

France of the first half of the 17th century – the era of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. The town of Loudun, where the nuns of the Ursuline Convent suddenly go crazy. Catholic priest Urbain Grandier has been accused of spiritual and sexual seduction of the sisters. A passionate womanizer and lover of life, a charismatic and educated man, he must suffer severe punishment for witchcraft and go to the stake. Those who rallied against Grandier claimed that he was an insidious tempter and an accomplice of the devil. Huxley, who has studied in detail historical documents about this sensational trial, believes that the priest fell victim to political intrigue. The author not only revives the events of the past, he analyzes the Loudun incident, relying on contemporary theories, richly illustrates the material with examples from notes on French life, excerpts from theological and scientific works, and quotes from masterpieces of world fiction. He also looks for genuine connections between such phenomena as witch hunts, fascism, the communist idea and the persecution of “red sympathizers” in the United States.

Jester’s round dance:

Creative bohemia of post-war London of the 20s… Lost illusions, thirst for momentary pleasures… “Acting” as a form of life… A tragicomic work of a wonderful British writer that is surprisingly relevant today.

Time must have a stop:

The story of seventeen-year-old Sebastian Barnack and three people who turned his life upside down. Uncle Eustace, a hedonist and bon vivant, will teach the young man to enjoy earthly joys with taste. The beautiful and mysterious mature woman Veronica Tweil will become his first love. And another uncle, the mystic and seeker of the highest truth Bruno, will have to reveal to Sebastian that there are things in the world that are much more important than everyday reality… Each of these heroes carries his own idea and expresses many bitter and fair truths about the structure of the human soul, society and even the Universe. Huxley himself believed that in this novel he was able to most deeply explore the problems facing man in the 20th century.

Brave New World (collection):

The book includes the novels of the Soviet writer E. Zamyatin “We” (1920) and “Brave New World” (1932) and the classic of English literature O. Huxley – the brightest examples of the dystopian genre.