Apart from writing novels, he also wrote a few travel books, poems, plays and several essays on religion, art and sociology. He was born in Godalming on 26th July, in an upper scale family. He came from a literary background, his father also being a biographer, editor and poet. Huxley was educated at Eton College in Berkshire from When he was just fourteen years old, his mother died. He became more famous, with his reputation established, when his first novel "Crome Yellow" was published.
Huxley wrote some comic novels, such as "Antic Hay" and "Those Barren Leaves" ; here he made clear that he had an extraordinary ability in introducing very intellectual ideas in fiction novels.
In Crome Yellow and in Antic Hay he shows the expression of a mood of disenchantment in the early s related to the past Victorian mores. His generation had experienced "the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch", in Huxley's words.
Some people criticised the explicit discussion of sex in his novel Antic Hay, which was even burned in Cairo due to these criticisms. He published a book of essays about philosophical and social aspects in , "Proper Studies". It is all movement and noise It was his visit to the United States which made him so pesimistic about the cultural future of Europe. He said: "The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration for the worse of established standards.
He could see the fascist Italy that was led by Benito Mussolini; this might have had some influence in Brave New World. Fascism and the incidents of the Soviet Union helped him when creating his distopia or bad utopia.
Huxley was in each of his writings very critical with Western civilization. Huxley wrote Brave New World, his most celebrated work, in only four months in Three years before this his best sold novel "Point Counter Point" had been published; here he tried to mix the novel and the essay. During these three years, he had written some stories, poems and some essays, but no big novel.
Brief Candles, ,was a collection of short stories, Music at Night, , volumes of essays. By that time, Huxley was more concerned with things such as anarchism or mystical salvation than with the lamentable situation of the contemporary society. In began publishing criticisms first theatrical in The Westminster Gazette, collaboration that suspended at the end of a year, when it gave to printing your first novel, Crome Yellow the scandals of Crome, , a brilliant and witty satirical narration which was a resounding success, embodied in four reprints of which was in just six years.
By that time, selling rate reached by his first narration allowed him to abandon their journalistic activities to focus exclusively on the cultivation of literary creation. Immersed in a febrile literary activity, Aldous Huxley then published a couple of books of essays and a pleasant diary of the trip that had just carried out to India, Jesting Pilate , in which began to show his dazzling thinking and spirituality of the East.
Two years later, returned to the shelves of the libraries with the titled novel Point Counter Point counterpoint, , considered as one of the most characteristic of the first stage of the narrative works, and valued by the author himself as the most robust and complete narration that had published up to then.
At the beginning of the s, following the publication of Brave New World a happy world, - title taken from a passage in the Tempest, Shakespeare , Aldous Huxley went from being a prominent novelist of the English literary scene to become a writer of universal popularity.
In the line of the great satirical utopias inaugurated by the Narrator Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin with the publication of his novel us which, although appeared in semi-clandestina way in Prague in , had been the subject of a first edition in England in , this exceptional narration of the writer from Godalming anticipated a vision of the world and of the future society in which individual freedoms were crushed by the unstoppable machinery of scientific development and the technocratic planning.
While traveling about Europe with his family for the next several years, Huxley produced the commercially successful novels Antic Hay , Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point , which, like Crome , were satires of contemporary society and conventional morality. Ensconced in his recently purchased villa in the South of France, in late Huxley began work on what is now widely considered to be one of the Western canon's most important novels.
Brave New World is also an astonishingly prescient novel, foretelling advances in each of these areas that were as much as a half-century away. Set in London in , the 7th century After Ford, Brave New World presents a future in which genetically engineered babies are produced on assembly lines, the social and economic divide between the haves and the have nots is legally enforced and discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, sex and entertainment.
In the decades that followed, that prestige would enable Huxley to not only indulge his love of travel but to also explore new ways of being. Huxley followed Brave New World with the novel Eyeless in Gaza , which showed his blossoming interest in Eastern philosophy and mysticism.
The following year, he left Europe for North America, where he completed a work on pacifism titled Ends and Means , and in he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he would spend most of the rest of his life.
During this time, Huxley added screenwriter to his long list of occupations and was paid handsomely by studios for his work. He also worked on countless articles and editorials. Much of what time he had left he devoted to his interest in Eastern mysticism, beginning a decades-long association with the Vedanta Society, whose journal Huxley contributed numerous pieces to.
This interest in mysticism also led Huxley to experiment with the hallucinogen mescaline, which he wrote about in his collection of essays The Doors of Perception. The title would later be appropriated by Jim Morrison as the name for his legendary rock group, the Doors. In early , Maria died of cancer, and later that year Huxley published his next novel, The Genius and the Goddess.
In , Huxley married his second wife, Laura, who would later write a biography of their life together titled This Timeless Moment
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