aldous-huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was an English-born writer, whose masterpiece novel, Brave New World, depicted a future in which universal happiness is only achieved by thoroughly dehumanizing humanity.

Though best known as a novelist, his wide-ranging output also included essays, short stories, travel writings, poetry, plays and screenplays. Although a mocking critic of social mores, Huxley was essentially a humanist, and, by his life’s end fully embraced spiritualism.

Huxley was born into one of England’s most famed intellectual families. His father, Leonard Huxley, was a noted writer and herbalist, and himself the son of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest naturalists, Thomas Henry Huxley. A staunch supporter of the Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley was nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog”; during a public debate with an archbishop, he issued the rejoinder, “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.”

The maternal side of Aldous Huxley’s family was no less august. His mother, Julia Arnold, was the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold and sister to the author Mrs. Humphrey Ward. She was also the founder of the Prior’s Field School, an all-girls boarding and day school.

Aldous Huxley’s education was initially tended to by his mother. When her terminal illness made that impossible, Huxley continued his studies at Eton College and eventually graduated from Balliol at Oxford University. During a brief tenure as French teacher at Eton, Huxley made the acquaintanceship of George Orwell, then one of his students.

In the years between Eton and Balliol, Huxley contracted an eye infection that left him essentially blind for a few years. Although he recovered his vision well enough to complete his studies, his vision would trouble him throughout his life.

This medical crisis, along with the death of his mother when he was fourteen and the suicide of his brother, his closest companion, a few years later, would leave Huxley with a life-long preoccupation with transience, of both joy and life.

His diminished vision made Huxley unfit for military service during World War I. Instead, Huxley turned to employment in the Air Ministry, before abandoning administrative work in favor of working as a farm laborer at Garsington Manor, the farm of Lady Ottoline Morrell. There he was first introduced to members of the Bloomsbury Group, including D.H. Lawrence, whose friendship would inspire Huxley’s writing and last until Lawrence’s death in 1930.

At Garsington, Huxley also met Maria Nijs, Belgian refugee. They married in 1919 and had a son, Matthew, a year later.

In 1921, Huxley published his first novel, Crome Yellow, a thinly veiled satire of his time spent at Garsington Manor. Over the next decade, he would publish three more novels, essay collections, short stories and travel writing, before publ