Aldous Huxley
1 book analyzed
Biography
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) came from one of the most formidable intellectual dynasties in British history. His grandfather was T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin's most combative defender and the coiner of the word 'agnostic.' His brother Julian became a leading biologist and UNESCO's first Director-General. His great-uncle was Matthew Arnold. The weight of Victorian scientific rationalism and literary distinction pressed on Huxley from birth — and his greatest novel is, among other things, a thought experiment about what happens when science wins completely. At sixteen, Huxley contracted keratitis punctata and was nearly blind for two to three years. He recovered partial sight, enough to read laboriously and write, but never well enough for his first ambition: medicine. He studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, instead, graduating in 1916 with a first-class degree. He spent years in London literary circles — he knew D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — before settling in Italy and France in the 1920s. He moved to the United States in 1937, settling eventually in Los Angeles. He became close to the circle around the Vedanta Society and developed deep interests in mysticism, Eastern philosophy, and altered states of consciousness. In 1953, Huxley took mescaline for the first time, an experience he documented in The Doors of Perception (1954) — a book whose title came from William Blake and whose content directly influenced 1960s psychedelic culture. He experimented with LSD toward the end of his life and, on November 22, 1963 — the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated — died asking his wife to administer LSD to him as he lay dying. He died under its influence. The man who spent Brave New World satirizing pharmaceutical happiness spent his last hours seeking it through a different chemistry — a biographical irony he would have appreciated.