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69-500: Aldous Leonard Huxley ( / ˈ ɔː l d ə s / AWL -dəs ; 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works , as well as essays, narratives , and poems. Born into the prominent Huxley family , he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford , with a degree in English literature . Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited

138-471: A 1955 military coup , self-titled as “ Revolución Libertadora ” (“The Liberating Revolution”), which deposed the Argentine constitutional president Juan Domingo Perón and installed a dictatorship (whose leader was the hard-line general Pedro Eugenio Aramburu ) into power. The book's style makes use of a constant shift between the first and third person narrative, with the protagonists' voices heard throughout

207-420: A Summer (1939). The novel won Huxley a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel. During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography My Guru and His Disciple , states that Huxley earned more than $ 3,000 per week (approximately $ 50,000 in 2020 dollars) as

276-671: A bad way." Huxley's engagement with Eastern wisdom traditions was entirely compatible with a strong appreciation of modern science . Biographer Milton Birnbaum wrote that Huxley "ended by embracing both science and Eastern religion". In his last book, Literature and Science , Huxley wrote that "The ethical and philosophical implications of modern science are more Buddhist than Christian...." In "A Philosopher's Visionary Prediction", published one month before he died, Huxley endorsed training in general semantics and "the nonverbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness", writing that "We must learn how to be mentally silent, we must cultivate

345-418: A basis for In Cold Blood (1965). He spent years tracking the story, spent considerable time with the people involved, watched hours of film footage, listened to recordings, and read transcripts and notes. He once claimed that everything within the book would be true, word for word. To gather details, Capote interviewed the murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith . But Ben Yagoda notes that "almost from

414-522: A dystopian London, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning . Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander , on whom he based a character in Eyeless in Gaza . During this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means (1937), An Encyclopedia of Pacifism , and Pacifism and Philosophy , and

483-455: A growing degree of popular controversy about Huxley's eyesight. Non-fiction novel The genre goes back at least as far as André Breton 's Nadja (1928) and several books by the Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval , such as Ulice Git-le-coeur (1936). One of the early English books in the genre is Rebecca West 's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Jim Bishop's The Glass Crutch (1945)

552-469: A man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.” Aldous Huxley's agnosticism, together with his speculative propensity, made it difficult for him fully embrace any form of institutionalised religion. Over the last 30 years of his life, he accepted and wrote about concepts found in Vedanta and was a leading advocate of

621-444: A screenwriter, and that he used much of it to transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos , a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor . (Eventually, the film

690-522: A wealth of intimate detail. Never have the casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with so minute a fidelity." In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita – The Song of God , translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. As an advocate of the perennial philosophy, Huxley

759-469: A writer and broadcaster, philosopher and interpreter of contemporary science. Heard was nearly five years older than Huxley, and introduced him to a variety of profound ideas, subtle interconnections, and various emerging spiritual and psychotherapy methods. Works of this period included novels about the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress , (his magnum opus Brave New World ), and on pacifist themes ( Eyeless in Gaza ). In Brave New World , set in

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828-501: Is a collection of seven short stories by Danilo Kiš published in 1976 (and translated into English by Duska Mikic-Mitchell in 1978). The stories are based on historical events and deal with themes of political deception, betrayal, and murder in Eastern Europe during the first half of the 20th century (except for "Dogs and Books", which takes place in 14th century France). Several of the stories are written as fictional biographies wherein

897-516: Is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life." Having tried LSD in the 1950s, he became an advisor to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their early-1960s research work with psychedelic drugs at Harvard. Personality differences led Huxley to distance himself from Leary, when Huxley grew concerned that Leary had become too keen on indiscriminately promoting

966-483: Is that growing one which might be called the nonfiction novel." The next year, he applied the term to Leon Uris 's Armageddon (1964). Early influences on the genre can be traced to books such as Ka-tzetnik 135633 's (Yehiel Dinur) novellas Salamdra (1946) and House of Dolls (1953), Carlos Bulosan 's America Is in the Heart (1946), and John Dos Passos 's USA trilogy (1930–36). House of Dolls describes

1035-590: Is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence. That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end. For Huxley, one of

1104-538: The McCarran Act , the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959, Huxley turned down an offer to be made a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without giving a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while his brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974. In the fall semester of 1960 Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be

1173-643: The Peace Pledge Union . But, they remained frustrated by the conflicting goals of the political left – some favoring pacifism (as did Huxley and Heard), while other wanting to take up arms against fascism in the Spanish Civil War . After joining the PPU, Huxley expressed his frustration with politics in a letter from 1935, “…the thing finally resolves itself into a religious problem — an uncomfortable fact which one must be prepared to face and which I have come during

1242-489: The Perennial Philosophy , which holds that the same metaphysical truths are found in all the major religions of the world. In the 1920s, Huxley was skeptical of religion, "Earlier in his career he had rejected mysticism, often poking fun at it in his novels [...]" Gerald Heard became an influential friend of Huxley, and since the mid-1920s had been exploring Vedanta, as a way of understanding individual human life and

1311-634: The Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist . He grew interested in philosophical mysticism , as well as universalism , addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline . In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia , respectively. Huxley

1380-656: The Vedanta Society of Southern California , founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda . Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and other followers, he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices. From 1941 until 1960, Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West , published by the society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John Van Druten from 1951 through 1962. In 1942 The Gospel of Ramakrishna

1449-402: The 1930s, connected with him again in the U.S. in the early 1960s and wrote that "the enormous intellect, the beautifully modulated voice, the gentle objectivity, all were unchanged. He was one of the most highly civilized human beings I had ever met." Biographer Harold H. Watts wrote that Huxley's writings in the "final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on

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1518-625: The 1970s, edited by Philip Roth . Later works classified as non-fiction novels include The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey: A Nonfiction Novel (1993) by Bland Simpson, which tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of 19-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901; In the Time of the Butterflies (1995) by Julia Alvarez , which fictionalizes

1587-526: The 1970s, the non-fiction novel has somewhat fallen out of favor. However, forms such as the extended essay , the memoir , and the biography (and autobiography ), as well as autofiction , can explore similar territory. Joan Didion , for instance, has never called her own work a "non-fiction novel", while she has been repeatedly credited with writing them but calling them "extended" or "long" essays. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Serbo-Croatian: Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča / Гробница за Бориса Давидовича )

1656-537: The Bates method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that, for the first time in more than 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his experiences with the Bates method, The Art of Seeing , which was published in 1942 (U.S.), 1943 (UK). The book contained some generally disputed theories, and its publication created

1725-692: The Carnegie Visiting professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled, "What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and art. Robert S. de Ropp (scientist, humanitarian, and author), who had spent time with Huxley in England in

1794-884: The Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919, John Middleton Murry was reorganising the Athenaeum and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1899–1955), also at Garsington. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence . Following Lawrence's death in 1930 (he and Maria were present at his death in Provence), Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932). Very early in 1929, in London, Huxley met Gerald Heard ,

1863-617: The U.S., mainly southern California , until his death, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico , where he wrote Ends and Means (1937). The book contains tracts on war , inequality , religion and ethics . Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta ( Upanishad-centered philosophy ), meditation , and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa . In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti , whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years, with Krishnamurti representing

1932-408: The art of pure receptivity.... [T]he individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in." Huxley described himself as agnostic, a word coined by his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley , a scientist who championed the scientific method and was a major supporter of Darwin's theories. This is the definition he gave, “…it is wrong for

2001-461: The article: For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this: That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which

2070-418: The attractive features of Vedanta is that it provided a historic and established philosophy and practice that embraced the Perennial Philosophy ; that there is a commonality of experiences across all the mystical branches of the world's religions. Huxley wrote in the introduction of his book The Perennial Philosophy : The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to

2139-777: The authors to have appeared in Oxford Poetry are Fleur Adcock , A. Alvarez , W. H. Auden , Anne Carson , Nevill Coghill , David Constantine , Robert Crawford , Carol Ann Duffy , Elaine Feinstein , Graham Greene , Seamus Heaney , W. N. Herbert , Geoffrey Hill , Christopher Isherwood , Elizabeth Jennings , Jenny Joseph , Stephen Knight , Ronald Knox , Philip Larkin , Cecil Day-Lewis , Michael Longley , Louis MacNeice , Peter McDonald , Christopher Middleton , Andrew Motion , Paul Muldoon , Tom Paulin , Mario Petrucci , Craig Raine , Jo Shapcott , Stephen Spender , George Szirtes , J. R. R. Tolkien , Susan Wicks and Charles Wright . As well as publishing two issues per year,

Aldous Huxley - Misplaced Pages Continue

2208-429: The central problems of many modern men". Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these, he made some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace , Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency towards distinctly hierarchical social organisation;

2277-486: The circle. Not long afterwards, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy , which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College . He spent much time at the college in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel After Many

2346-409: The criticism to Huxley's widow, Laura: [December 11, 1963, a few weeks after Aldous Huxley’s death] The publisher had suggested John Lehmann should write the biography. Laura [Huxley] asked me what I thought of the idea, so I had to tell her that John disbelieves in, and is aggressive toward, the metaphysical beliefs that Aldous held. All he would describe would be a clever young intellectual who later

2415-529: The crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities. In a December 1962 letter to brother Julian, summarizing a paper he had presented in Santa Barbara , he wrote, "What I said was that if we didn't pretty quickly start thinking of human problems in ecological terms rather than in terms of power politics we should very soon be in

2484-498: The drugs. Differing accounts exist about the details of the quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life. Circa 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates method , in which he was instructed by Margaret Darst Corbett . In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (16 ha) ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California , in northern Los Angeles County . Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with

2553-504: The essential truth of his stories to be revealed. Oxford Poetry Oxford Poetry is a literary magazine based in Oxford , England. It is currently edited by Luke Allan. The magazine is published by Partus Press . Founded in 1910 by Basil Blackwell , its editors have included Dorothy L. Sayers , Aldous Huxley , Robert Graves , Vera Brittain , Kingsley Amis , Anthony Thwaite , John Fuller and Bernard O'Donoghue . Among

2622-496: The experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel. Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were social satires, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World (1932)

2691-405: The individual's relationship to the universe. Heard and Huxley both saw the political implications of Vedanta, which could help bring about peace, specifically that there is an underlying reality that all humans and the universe are a part of. In the 1930s, Huxley and Gerald Heard both became active in the effort to avoid another world war, writing essays and eventually publicly speaking in support of

2760-613: The journey of the young Daniella Parleshnik during the Holocaust , as she becomes part of the "Joy Division," a Nazi system keeping Jewish women as sex slaves in concentration camps. The book's plot was inspired by the Dinur's experience from the Holocaust and his younger sister, who did not survive the Holocaust. Works of history or biography have often used the narrative devices of fiction to depict real-world events. Scholars have suggested that

2829-636: The last year to find it easier to face.” Huxley and Heard turned their attention to addressing the big problems of the world through transforming the individual, "[...] a forest is only as green as the individual trees of the forest is green [...]" This was the genesis of the Human Potential Movement , that gained traction in the 1960s. In the late 1930s, Huxley and Heard immigrated to the United States, and beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with

Aldous Huxley - Misplaced Pages Continue

2898-594: The literary magazine Oxford Poetry , before going on to publish travel writing , satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by

2967-673: The lives of the Mirabal sisters who gave their lives fighting a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic , based on their accounts; and A Civil Action (1996) by Jonathan Harr, which describes the drama caused by a real-life water contamination scandal in Massachusetts in the 1980s. Homer Hickam , author of Rocket Boys (1998) and other well-known memoirs, has described his work as novel-memoirs or "novoirs", wherein he uses novelistic techniques, including fictional conversations, to allow

3036-414: The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under

3105-538: The magazine hosts the annual Oxford Poetry Prize. The 2022 Prize was judged by Emily Berry . First prize was won by Dominic Leonard , second prize by Linda Ravenswood , and third prize by Caleb Leow . The 2023 edition of the Prize was judged by Will Harris . First prize was won by Miruna Fulgeanu , second prize by Jo Davis , and third prize by Eric Yip . Before the inauguration of the Oxford Poetry Prize in 2022,

3174-630: The main characters interact with historical figures. The Dalkey Archive Press edition includes an introduction by Joseph Brodsky and an afterword by William T. Vollmann. Harold Bloom includes A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900–present) in The Western Canon. The book is featured in Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from

3243-671: The manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: Knowledge and Understanding and Who Are We? from 1955. Many of Huxley's contemporaries and critics were disappointed by Huxley's turn to mysticism; Isherwood describes in his diary how he had to explain

3312-450: The mid-1960s). The novel is hybridized with journalistic narration, which, like Capote's prose, places little emphasis on the process of narration (although Wolfe, unlike Capote, occasionally narrates from first-person). Hunter S. Thompson 's approach of " Gonzo Journalism " (in books like Hell's Angels (1966)) abandoned Capote's narrative style to intermingle personal experiences and observations with more traditional journalism. Since

3381-404: The more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially and historically informed position. Huxley wrote a foreword to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, The First and Last Freedom (1954). Huxley and Heard became Vedantists in the group formed around Hindu Swami Prabhavananda , and subsequently introduced Christopher Isherwood to

3450-511: The narration, interspersed with facts and details of the events described. Truman Capote later adopted the genre. He argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. He was immediately intrigued after reading the story of the Clutter murders in The New York Times , and used the events surrounding the crime as

3519-726: The novel Operación Masacre (1957) by the Argentine author and journalist Rodolfo Walsh was the first non-fiction novel in Spanish. Rodolfo Walsh 's Operación Masacre (1957) details the José León Suárez massacre , which involved the unlawful capture and shooting of twelve innocent civilians by the Buenos Aires ' Chief of Police, during an unrelated military uprising by the Peronist rebel leader Juan José Valle . These events followed

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3588-483: The only road of escape from the self–imposed necessity of self–destruction. As a means of personally realizing the "divine Reality", he described a "Minimum Working Hypothesis" in the Introduction to Swami Prabhavananda's and Christopher Isherwood's translation of the Bhagavad Gita and in a free-standing essay in Vedanta and the West , a publication of Vedanta Press . This is the outline, that Huxley elaborates on in

3657-524: The posthumous publication of J. D. Unwin 's 1940 book Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society . On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four , congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter, he predicted: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that

3726-587: The publication of The Doors of Perception , in which he recounted this experience, Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda disagreed about the meaning and importance of the psychedelic drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions. Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception . Huxley wrote that "The mystical experience

3795-614: The start, skeptics challenged the accuracy of In Cold Blood. One early revelation (acknowledged by Capote before his death in 1984) was that the last scene in the book, a graveyard conversation between a detective and the murdered girl’s best friend, was pure invention." In his review of the book in The American Scholar , Robert Langbaum wrote, "Once we look at structure, we find many nonfiction works as artful and sometimes more artful than many novels. Northrop Frye has, in his influential Anatomy of Criticism , gone so far as to apply

3864-457: The word fiction to any 'work of art in prose.' ... By taking [Capote] at his word and comparing his book to a novel, we can both appreciate his achievement and see its limits. For its best effects are novelistic and it falls short just where it is not novelistic enough." Other examples of the form are: Tom Wolfe 's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) was an example of the school of New Journalism (often characterized as an invention of

3933-848: Was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years" and "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor". In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford , where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War ; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours . His brother Julian wrote: I believe his blindness

4002-473: Was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province. Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College , where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell ) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils. He

4071-526: Was advertised as "one of the most unusual best-sellers ever published—a non-fiction novel." Perhaps the most influential non-fiction novel of the 20th century was John Hersey 's Hiroshima (1946). Scholar David Schmid writes that "many American writers during the post-World War II period, including Joan Didion , Truman Capote , and Norman Mailer , [chose] to follow Hersey’s lead." In The New York Times , Herbert Mitgang referred to Paul Goodman 's Making Do (1963) as falling into "the category [that]

4140-408: Was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) . In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley , and friend Gerald Heard. Cyril Connolly wrote, of the two intellectuals (Huxley and Heard) in the late 1930s, "all European avenues had been exhausted in the search for a way forward – politics, art, science – pitching them both toward the US in 1937." Huxley lived in

4209-463: Was born in Godalming , Surrey, England, on 26 July 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley , who edited The Cornhill Magazine , and his first wife, Julia Arnold , who founded Prior's Field School . Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward . Julia named him Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. Aldous

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4278-504: Was completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including Jane Eyre (1944). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll . The script was not used, however. Huxley wrote an introduction to

4347-408: Was corrupted by Hollywood and went astray after spooks. In early 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline . Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond , a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and supervised Huxley's session in southern California. After

4416-505: Was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently contemplated "the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing . Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College . His mother died in 1908, when he

4485-552: Was drawn to the Gita , as he explained in the Introduction, written during WWII, when it was still not clear who would win: The Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to

4554-639: Was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s, he was also a contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue magazines. During the First World War , Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell , working as a farm labourer. While at the Manor, he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell , Alfred North Whitehead , and Clive Bell . Later, in Crome Yellow (1921), he caricatured

4623-517: Was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and others spoke highly of his excellent command of language. Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond , an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to an introduction to his science fiction novel Brave New World (1932),

4692-547: Was published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York. The book was translated by Swami Nikhilananda , with help from Joseph Campbell and Margaret Woodrow Wilson , daughter of US president Woodrow Wilson. Aldous Huxley wrote in the foreword, "...a book unique, so far as my knowledge goes, in the literature of hagiography. Never have the small events of a contemplative's daily life been described with such

4761-427: Was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley , the zoologist , agnostic , and controversialist who had often been called "Darwin's Bulldog". His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression . As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He

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