Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley's Biography

Born into a famous intellectual family on 26 July 1894, Huxley showed a unique and curious outlook from a young age. These tendencies were strongly encouraged by his family. His grandfather was the famous evolutionary biologist, Thomas Henry Huxley, and his mother was the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward's sister. His brothers, Andrew and Julian, went on to achieve fame in the fields of physiology and biology.

His longtime friend Gerald Heard once said that Huxley’s background

Huxley studied at Eton and graduated from Oxford in 1916. He excelled there despite his partial blindness caused by a teenage case of keratitis. This blindness caused him to be exempt from military service in the war, but also meant that he couldn't follow his first career choice of science. Instead, he chose literature. His first book of poems The Burning Wheel (1916) was published shortly after his graduation.

He married the Belgian Maria Nys in 1919, and their son Matthew Huxley was born in 1920. Huxley spent much of his career in Italy and America, which influenced his novel’s views and themes.

An unusual academic, Huxley experimented with traditional and new hallucinogenic substances throughout his adult life. His experiences inspired the novel, The Doors of Perception (1954).

Huxley's Cause of Death

Huxley died of laryngeal cancer on 23 November 1963 in Los Angeles. Legend has it that Huxley went out on an LSD trip administered by his wife. Interestingly, Huxley died the same day as author C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy, though many did not know this until days later because of the media coverage of the assassination.

Fig. 1 - Psychadelic image.

Aldous Huxley’s Novels

Huxley’s first novel, Chrome Yellow was written in 1921 and is a biting satire of English country house intellectuals. F. Scott Fitzgerald calls it

These elements of satire and irony are threads that run through Huxley’s early work. The subject matter did shift from his known world of English academia to themes of global relevance, like the rise of the technocracy with Brave New World (1932). He also became interested in Buddism, which is reflected in some of his later novels, like the utopian counterpoint to Brave New World, Island (1963).

Brave New World (1932)

Huxley wrote Brave New World in less than 6 months. Considered a pioneering work of the Dystopian Science Fiction genre, it is a modern classic. It warns of a future where technology has created a situation in which the population is highly regulated from pre-birth until death.

Set in AD 2540, or 632 ‘After Ford’, the novel continues the themes of satire seen in Huxley’s earlier work. ‘After Ford’ is a reference to the car manufacturer, Henry Ford, a pioneer of mass production. In Brave New World, Huxley depicts a future where science and technology have been harnessed to create an artificially harmonious and productive society.

The title of the novel references a phrase spoken by Miranda when she first meets the King of Naples and his men in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Shakespearean allusions are the most common in the novel, creating a juxtaposition between Shakespearean morality and the recited maxims of Huxley’s dystopian future, where books are banned. This can be seen most clearly in the contrast between John the Savage’s worldview and the complacent hedonism of Lenina.

From embryos at The Central Hatchery through early childhood, the citizens of the future are genetically modified and psychologically conditioned to behave in certain ways and to unquestioningly believe in certain things. With intelligence being determined at the embryonic phase, the conditioning takes care of segmenting the population into content labour-related castes named after the Greek alphabet.

Adult Alphas, the most intelligent caste, would never want to be a Gamma, or less intelligent. No Gamma would ever want to be an Alpha, either. To achieve harmony, technology, science, and a happy drug called Soma are all applied to remove discontent, agency, and individuality from the population.

Key themes are the loss of individuality, dystopia and totalitarianism, technology and control, mass consumption, mass production, and the price of permanent happiness.

Fig. 2 - Socially engineered embryos in Brave New World.

Island (1963)

This post-war novel is set on an island, of course. It is Huxley’s last novel and a utopian version of Brave New World. Although not his most famous work, Island is revolutionary for its time, as it combines Huxley’s interest in Eastern mythology with technology that is used for betterment.

As Gorman Beauchamp says,

The novel details Will Franaby's fake shipwreck on the island Pala. He is really there to spy on the inhabitants and assess their oil reserves. The neighbouring nations' interest in Pala is driven by greed and potentially a little envy.

In the novel, the people of Pala maintain their idyllic way of life by using freely available contraceptives, restricting the use of technology to medicine or food management, and limiting personal consumption.

After Will is welcomed, taken on a tour, and given a psychedelic experience by the islanders, he can begin to see the benefits of their way of life. It is too late. The neighbours who sent Will to spy destroy the island and its people.

Why is Aldous Huxley important to literature?

Aldous Huxley was in many ways a visionary. Many of today's pressing ecological, technocratic, and societal debates were foreseen in his works of dystopian and utopian fiction.

He began raising the need to consider how technology and consumerism would impact future societies. He asked how these could be tempered, if at all.

Other than raising relevant questions decades before they became current, he was an English academic who transgressed the world of English academia. His work and life spanned Europe, Beat counterculture, Hollywood, and mysticism. He demonstrated a sound understanding of science and technology. He was nominated for nine Nobel Prize Awards and actually awarded The Companion Of Literature in 1962.

Often described as a polymath, Huxley is still a relevant author today, despite being most active between the 1930s and the 1960s.

1. New World Encyclopedia, newworldencyclopedia.org.

2. Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow. 1921

3. Kevin Martin, Island, University of Hawaii. 2020.