Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was a British writer who emigrated to the United States. He was the member of the far-famed Huxley family who produced a total of brilliant scientific minds. Better known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Across his novels & essays Huxley functioned as an examiner & occasionally critic of social sir thomas more, social norms & ideals, & imaginable misapplications of science inside human life. When his earliest concerns will exist as known as "humanist," ultimately, he became quite concerned around "spiritual" cases such as parapsychology and mystically based philosophy, which he also wrote just about. Per prevent of his life, Huxley was considered, around certain conditioned circles, the 'leader of modern thought'.

Biography
Early years
Huxley was innate inside Godalming, Surrey, England. He was a boy of the writer Leonard Huxley by his first married woman, Julia Arnold; and grandson of the illustrious exponent of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist also noted for his evolutionary theories. Huxley intelligibly excelled in the areas he took higher professionally, for in his father's side were the total of noted men of science, while on his mother's were population of literary accomplishment.

Huxley was the lanky, finely framed little one world health organization was gifted intellectually. His father was the sales person herbalist as well as an author, thus Aldous began his learning within his father's easily-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued around the school known as Hillside, which his mother supervised for many years until she became terminally sick. From either a age of nine, Aldous was so educated in the British boarding school system. He took readily to the treating of ideas.

His mother Julia died within 1908, when Aldous was sole xiv, & his sister Roberta died of an unrelated incident in the equivalent year. 3 years late Aldous suffered an sickness (keratitis punctata) which seriously damaged his eyesight. His older brother Trev committed suicide in 1914. Aldous's touching-blindness disqualified him from service within World War I. It used to be that his sightedness recovered, he was take a breath to see English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Maturing as a lean young human overflow sestet feet inside height, a cerebrotonic Huxley's initial interest within literature was primarily noetic. When he was noted for his individual helpfulness, merely well late (occasionally say under a influence of such friends as D.H. Lawrence) did he heartily embrace feelings as matters of importance in his evolving personal philosophy and literary expression.

As the result his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father & experienced to earn a residing. For the short patch around 1918, he was employed getting provisions at a Air Ministry. However never desiring the career inside administration (or even inside business), Huxley's deficiency of transmissible means propelled him into applied literary operate.

Huxley got completed his number one (unpublished) novel at a age of 17 & began writing seriously around his early twenties. He wrote wonderful novels in dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, virtually all famously Brave New World, and in pacifist themes (e.g. Eyeless in Gaza). Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.

Middle years
Already the noted satirist and social thinker, during World War I, Huxley spent much of his period at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Late, inside Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured a Garsington life style, however remained friendly by using the Morrells. He married Maria Nys, whom he experienced met at Garsington.

Huxley moved to Llano, California in 1937, but such as his friend a philosopher Gerald Heard who accompanied him, Huxley was denied citizenship since he refused to ascribe his pacifism to religious beliefs. Within his 1937 book Finishes & Means, virtually all population inside modern civilization agree that it need the globe of 'liberty, peace, justice, & brotherly love', though it haven't been breathe to agree in training achieve it. His book goes in to choose how come a confusion or even disagreement is there & what will exist as done all about it.

Inside 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He became the Vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and he likewise introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Shortly when, Huxley wrote his book in widely held spiritual values & ideas, A Perennial Philosophy, which discussed teachings of the globe's outstanding religious mystic.

For virtually all of his life since a sickness around his teens which left Huxley touching blind, his sightedness was unfortunate (despite a unfair recovery which got enabled him to survey at Oxford). In 1939 he heard of the Bates Method for Natural Vision Improvement, and of the teacher (Margaret Corbett) world health organization was entity to teach him in the method. He claimed his sight improved dramatically following of using A method, so late wrote the book all about it (The Art of Seeing) which was published within 1942 (United states of america), 1943 (UK). He reported that first inside ended Twenty-five years, he was suspire to review while forgoing spectacles and without strain. He was the screenwriter for the 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice.

Later years
He began meditating and became a vegetarian. Thenceforth, his works were strongly influenced by mysticism and his experiences by owning a hallucinogenic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the head-shrinker Humphry Osmond in 1953. Huxley's psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from either a bit of lines in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake) and Heaven and Hell. A title of a previous became the inspiration for the naming of the rock band, The Doors. A select few of his writings in psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies.

Huxley's independent interest was does'nt around good anything undefined, mysterious, or even subjective, however inside what is for instance termed "higher mysticism"; he liked a term "perennial philosophy" that he used when a title of his noted book on the topic. In a period of the Fifties, Huxley's interest in the related field of psychical research grew keener.

Huxley's married woman, Maria, died of breast cancer in 1955, and within 1956 he remarried, to Laura Archera, world health organization was herself an creator & who wrote the biography of Aldous. Inside 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer. In a years that followed, sustaining his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures in "Human Potentialities" at a Esalen institute. Within 1959, Huxley, who remained the British Citizen turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government.

His ideas were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was as well invited to speak at many prestigious Our contries universities. At the speech given around 1961 at the California Medical School around San Francisco, Huxley warned: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."

Huxley's views on the proper roles of science & technology (when he portrayed these, say, inside Island) come akin to another noted English & U.s. thinkers of the twentieth century, like Lewis Mumford and Huxley's friend Gerald Heard (and, someway, Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher). Clearly, these men noticed descendent inside occasionally important movers of the immature generation, e.g., Stewart Brand.

Amongst humanists, Huxley was considered an rational's intellect. Although his fiscal circumstances got forced him to churn out articles & books, his thought & better writing earned him an noble-minded esteem. His books were oft on the involved reading lists of English & modern philosophy courses within Western colleges & universities. He was one of a twentieth-century thinkers honoured in the Scribners Publishing's "Leaders of Modern Thought" series (the volume of life & literary criticism by Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley).

Death and afterwards
In his deathbed, unable to speak, he processed the written asking to his married woman for "LSD, 100 µg, i.m." She obliged, and he died peacefully the following morning, November 22, 1963. Media coverage of his dying was overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of British author C. S. Lewis.

All told of Huxley's matured writings, 1 finds an awareness that seems to bridge a gap between "The Two Cultures" – the sciences and the humanities. This gulf posed the possibly tremendous condition, a single that was recognized by more thinkers in the period of Huxley's life-time, such as C.P. Snow. A interest among prof of humanities & liberal arts in Huxley's work, each when you took a writer's lifespan & subsequently, rests on this consciousness on the section of the creator, & course on the artful & typically humourous way where he expressed himself.

Huxley's satirical, dystopian, and utopian novels seldom fail to cause thought. A equivalent can be said for his essays & essay collections. Possibly his independent message is the tragedy that oft follows from either egocentrism, self-centredness, and selfishness.

Films

Huxley wrote several screenplays, and numbers of of his novels were late adapted for even film or television.

Notable works include a original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland, two productions of Brave New World, one of Point Counter Point, one of Eyeless in Gaza, and one of Ape and Essence. He was one of a film writer for Pride and Prejudice (1940 movie) and co-wrote the screenplay for the Jane Eyre (1944 movie) with John Houseman. Director Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, starring Vanessa Redgrave, is adapted from Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, and the 1990 manufactured-for-television film adaptation of Brave Future Globe was directed by Burt Brinckeroffer

Selected works

Novels
Crome Yellow (1921) Antic Hay (1923) Those Barren Leaves (1925) Point Counter Point (1928) Brave New World (1932) Eyeless in Gaza (1936) After Many a Summer (1939) Time Must Have a Stop (1944) Ape and Essence (1948) The Genius and the Goddess (1955) Island (1962)

Short stories
Limbo (1920) Mortal Coils (1922) Brief Candles (1930) About two Graces Little Mexican ''Jacob's Hands; A Fable (Late 1930s)

Poetry
A Burning Wheel (1916) Jonah (1917) A Kill of Youth (1918) Leda (1920) Arabia Infelix (1929) A Cicadias & More Verse form (1931)

Travel writing
Along The Road (1925) Jesting Pilate (1926) Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)

Essays
Do What You Will (1929) The Olive Tree (1936) The Art of Seeing (1942) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952) The Doors of Perception (1954) Heaven and Hell (1956) Brave New World Revisited (1958) Literature and Science (1963)

Philosophy
Ends and Means (1937) The Perennial Philosophy (1944) ISBN 006057058X

Biography

Grey Eminence (1941) The Devils of Loudun'' (1952)

Children's literature
The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)

Collections

Text and Pretext (1933) Gathered Short Stories (1957) Moksha: Writings in Psychedelics & a Airy Case (1977)

Trivia
He was sestet feet quadruplet & the half inches tall; Studied ballet for many years; Was George Orwell's French teacher for a term at Eton.