Aldous Huxley

Described his aim as a novelist as being 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay' - 'novel of ideas'

Died same day as JFK. as did C. S. Lewis. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton near Guildford.

Grandfather: Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and "Darwin's Bulldog"
Brother: Julian Huxley outstanding biologist - involved in eugenics

studied English literature at Balliol
taught French for a year at Eton where Eric Blair (George Orwell) was among his pupils [1984/BNW] On 21 October 1949 Huxley wrote to Orwell abt Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is."
"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that 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."

worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and [Mustapha] Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, part of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)

During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell.
lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, he edited his letters (1933).
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood - met Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, Ray Bradbury.

Screenwriting: Madame Curie (1943), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Jane Eyre (1944),Alice in Wonderland (1951)

In October 1930, the occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.
famously took 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying
The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake) inspired the name of the band The Doors. Huxley also appears on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." Music at Night, 1931

In Brave New World Revisited, he concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World much faster than he originally thought.
When Brave New World was released, B. Russell thought that Huxley's book was based on his book The Scientific Outlook that had been released the previous year.
Brave New World's plot ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
inspired by the H. G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to parody the novel

Brave New World written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book)

"For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism."