Brave New World
About the Author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Godalming, Surrey., His family consisted of some of the most distinguished members of English society. Aldous' grandfather was one of the biologists who helped develop the theory of evolution. His mother was the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist and the niece of Matthew Arnold, the poet.

When Huxley was 16 when an eye ailment made him nearly blind. He recovered some of his vison and went on to Oxford University and graduate with honors. He could not, however, fight in World War I, or to study medicine; something he had always dreamed of.

Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916. He married Maria Nys, a Belgian, in 1919. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. Huxley lived mostly in Italy during the 1920s. His experiences in fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini led an authoritarian government provided materials for Huxley's bad Utopia, as did his reading of books critical of the Soviet Union.

Huxley traveled around the world in 1925 and 1926, and during this time Huxley saw India and made his first visit to the United States.

Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best-seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays, but nothing major

In 1937, the Huxleys came to the United States; in 1938 they went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter (among his films was an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which starred the young Laurence Olivier). He remained for most of his life in California working primarily as a moral philosopher. He used his fiction as a vehicle for the ideals he developed.

In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to Brave New World in which he said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he had in the novel.

In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas you'll find in the novel--overpopulation, overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching.

In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years.

He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books. The most famous, based on his experiences taking mescaline under supervision, was nonfiction: Doors of Perception. (1954) Some readers have seen this book as an encouragement to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of the dangers of such experiments. Jim Morrison, inspired by Huxley's writing, later named his group after the book.

Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. The English critic Critics objected that Huxley was a better essayist than novelist because he cared more about his ideas than about plot or characters, and his novels' ideas often get in the way of the story.

Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in 1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. With Laura by his side, Huxley ingested a dose of mescaline during his dying moments.