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.

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Biography

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Early years

Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, being a son of the writer Leonard Huxley by his first wife, Julia Arnold; and grandson of Thomas Huxley. Julia died in 1908, when Aldous was only thirteen. 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Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties.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.

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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.

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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 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. 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."

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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).

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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.

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