Aldous (Leonard) Huxley

Biography

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 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. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when Aldous was fourteen.

Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. 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Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. In Brave New World Huxley protrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F.

Middle years

During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria and friend Gerald Heard. At this time too Huxley wrote Ends and Means; 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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. 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

Short stories

Poetry

Travel writing

Essay collections

Philosophy

Biography and nonfiction

Children's literature

Collections

Quotations

Trivia