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Notes unable to complete the rigorous scientific training he had undertaken. Though problems with
his eyes would remain with him for the rest of his life, Huxley was able to attend Oxford
where he received a degree in English literature.
Huxley’s career began in journalism and included music and artistic criticism as well as book
reviews. He also began writing poems, essays, and historical pieces. Huxley’s first introduction
to British intellectual society occurred while working as a farm laborer at Garsington Manor,
the site of the “Bloomsbury Society,” a group of public intellectuals that included Bertrand
Russell. There he would marry Maria Nys and they would have one child, Matthew Huxley.
He also wrote his first book, a volume of poetry called The Burning Wheel. While working as
an editor for “House and Garden” during the1920s, Huxley wrote many novels including
Brave New World.

Task Write down the family background of Huxley.

Huxley spent several years in Italy where he formed a friendship with D.H. Lawrence. They
would remain close friends and Huxley would later edit Lawrence’s collected letters after his
death. In 1937, Huxley moved back to the United States to live in Hollywood, California,
where he helped write scripts for several Hollywood movies of the time, although he never
had a lasting career in movies. After World War II, he famously became involved with the
early psychedelic drug movement. Huxley was an early proponent of the use of LSD, mescaline,
and peyote for their mind-altering effects. His 1954 book The Doors of Perception argued that
through the use of psychedelic drugs, people would be able to “cleanse” the doors of perception
in order to embrace the infinite reality of the world.

A controversial figure for most of his life, Huxley died from cancer on November 22, 1963,
only hours after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas. By the time of his
death, he was embraced in some circles as an intellectual and writer of the highest class,
especially for his creation of the dystopian fantasy in his novel Brave New World and his
engagement of the theme of commercialization in modern society. Others, however, saw him
as a pseudo-scientist for his work in mystical traditions and his insistence on experiencing
alternate realities through meditation, Eastern religions, and drug use.

Did u know? For Huxley accomplishments, Huxley received the Award of Merit for the
Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959.

17.1.2 Introduction to the Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred
years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace,
has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and true relationships.
Huxley’s novel is chiefly a critique of the socialist policies that states had begun to advocate
in the early twentieth century. Huxley, by 1932, had observed the increasing tendency of
Western government to intrude upon people’s lives. This intrusion, he believed, limited the
expression of freedom and beauty that is integral to the human character. Through Brave New
World and his other writings, he suggested that beauty is a result of pain and that society’s
desire to eliminate pain limits society’s ability to thrive culturally and emotionally. Many
readers initially found this difficult to accept, living as they did in the aftermath of World War

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