Huxley, Aldous Leonard
Huxley, Aldous Leonard,
1894–1963, English author; grandson of Thomas Henry HuxleyHuxley, Thomas Henry,1825–95, English biologist and educator, grad. Charing Cross Hospital, 1845. Huxley gave up his own biological research to become an influential scientific publicist and was the principal exponent of Darwinism in England.
..... Click the link for more information. , brother of Sir Julian HuxleyHuxley, Sir Julian Sorell,
1887–1975, English biologist and writer, educated at Oxford; grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, and half-brother of Sir Andrew Huxley. He taught at the Rice Institute, Houston, Tex.
..... Click the link for more information. , and half-brother of Sir Andrew HuxleyHuxley, Sir Andrew Fielding,
1917–2012, British physiologist, educated at University College, London; grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, half-brother of Sir Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley.
..... Click the link for more information. . Educated at Eton and Oxford, he traveled widely and during the 1920s lived in Italy. He came to the United States in the 1937 and settled in California. On the verge of blindness from the time he was 16, Huxley devoted much time and energy in an effort to improve his vision. He began his literary career writing critical essays and symbolist poetry, but he soon turned to the novel. Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928) are brittle, skeptical pictures of a decadent society. Brave New World (1932), the most popular of his novels, presents a nightmarish, dystopian civilization in the 25th cent. It was followed by Eyeless in Gaza (1936), After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), Ape and Essence (1948), The Devils of Loudon (1952), and The Genius and the Goddess (1955). Marked by an exuberance of ideas and comic invention, his novels reflect, with increasing cynicism, his disgust and disillusionment with the modern world. His later writings, however, reveal a strong interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophy. His fascination with mind-expansion and experimentation with LSD prompted the writing of The Doors of Perception (1954), a long essay extremely popular in the drug-oriented 1960s and still one of his most-read books. Huxley's other works include collections of short stories, of which Mortal Coils (1922) is representative, and essays, including End and Means (1937) and Brave New World Revisited (1958).
Bibliography
See R. S. Baker and J. Sexton, ed., Complete Essays (6 vol., 2000–2002); memoir by his wife, L. A. Huxley (1968); J. Sexton, ed., Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters (2007); biographies by S. Bedford (2 vol., 1973–74), G. A. Nance (1989), and N. Murray (2003); studies by P. Thody (1973), K. M. May (1973), G. Cockshott (1980), P. E. Firchow (1984), and M. Schubert (1986); R. W. Clark, The Huxleys (1968).
Huxley, Aldous Leonard
Born July 26, 1894, at Go-dalming, Surrey; died Nov. 22, 1963, in Los Angeles, Calif. English writer. Grandson of the biologist and Darwinist T. H. Huxley.
After graduating from Oxford University in 1921, Huxley pursued a literary career. His writings include poetry, short stories, travel notes, biographies, philosophical tracts, and critical essays on literature, theater, music, and painting. He is best known as a novelist. His early novels—Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923; Russian translation, 1936), and Point Counter Point (1928; Russian translation, 1936)—are representative of what came to be known as the intellectual novel, or, as Huxley called it, the novel of ideas. Satire is dominant in his books of the 1920’s, the objects of his satire being the traditional snobbery of the British, the pretentiousness and spiritual emptiness of “high society,” and the thoughtless embrace of Freudianism and avant-gardism by some sections of the intelligentsia.
In the 1930’s, Huxley’s work showed a slackening of the satirical impulse; his writings were predominantly concerned with the biological properties of human nature. The antiutopian Brave New World (1932) marked a stage in Huxley’s development; the novel’s basic idea was borrowed by the author from B. Russell’s Scientific Outlook (1931). The “brave new world” (the novel’s title is taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is completely automated, standardized, and soulless, and there is no room in it for art or for the most natural human feelings—love and the maternal instinct.
Huxley’s horror in the face of headlong technological advance and his lack of faith in social progress resulted in his turning toward religion, Eastern mysticism, and the idea of nonresistance to evil. But even the ideas of moral self-perfection in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) is vitiated by the novel’s grotesquely fantastic ending. In his works of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Huxley comes close to the modernistic treatment of man as a base and unclean animal—as in his novel Ape and Essence (1948). In the postwar years he devoted himself less frequently to artistic creation. Huxley’s evolution from rationalism to mysticism is a clear example of the crisis in the 20th century’s liberal-bourgeois consciousness.
WORKS
Collected Works, vols. 1–26. London, 1946–56.Collected Short Stories. New York, 1957.
Collected Essays. London, 1959.
Literature and Science. New York, 1963.
Letters. New York, 1970.
Crome Yellow. [Foreword by G. A. Andzhaparidze.] Moscow, 1976.
In Russian translation:
“Prekrasnyi novyi mir” (fragments), Internatsional’naia literatura, 1935, no. 8.
REFERENCES
Palievskii, P. “Gibel’ satirika.” In Sovremennaia literatura za rubezhom. Moscow, 1962.Zhantieva, D. G. “O. Khaksli.” In her book Angliiskii roman XX v. Moscow, 1965.
Ivasheva, V. V. “O. Khaksli.” In her book Angliiskaia literatura XX v. Moscow, 1967.
Shestakov, V. “Sotsial’naia antiutopiia O. Khaksli—mif i real’nost’.” Novyi mir, 1969, no. 7.
Allen, W. Traditsiia i mechta. Moscow, 1970. (Translated from English.)
Atkins, J. Aldous Huxley. London, 1967.
Holmes, C. M. Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality. Bloomington-London [1970].
Woodcock, G. Dawn and the Darkest Hour. New York, 1972.
Thody, P. Aldous Huxley. London, 1973.
Bedford, S. Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vols. 1–2. London, 1973–74.
G. A. ANDZHAPARIDZE