Brave New World | Author Biography

Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Laleham near Godalming, Surrey, England, but he grew up in London. His family was well-known for its scientific and intellectual achievements: Huxley’s father, Leonard, was a renowned editor and essayist, and his highly educated mother ran her own boarding school. His grandfather and brother were top biologists, and his half-brother, Andrew Huxley, won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work in physiology. When he was sixteen Aldous Huxley went to England’s prestigious Eton school and was trained in medicine, the arts, and science. From 1913 to 1916 he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he excelled academically and edited literary journals. Huxley was considered a prodigy, being exceptionally intelligent and creative.

Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley

There were many tragedies in Huxley’s life, however, from the early death of his mother from cancer when he was just fourteen to nearly losing his eyesight because of an illness as a teenager, but Huxley took these troubles in stride. Because of his failing vision, he did not fight in World War I or pursue a scientific career but focused instead on writing. He married Maria Nys in 1919, and they had one son, Matthew. To support his family, Huxley pursued writing, editing, and teaching, traveling throughout Europe India and the United States at various points.

Huxley published three books of poetry and a collection of short stories, which received a modest amount of attention from critics, before he turned to novels: Crome Yellow (1921), set on an estate and featuring the vain and narcissistic conversations between various artists, scientists, and members of high society; Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925), both satires of the lives of upper-class British people after World War I; and Point Counter Point (1928), a best-seller and complex novel of ideas featuring many characters and incorporating Huxley’s knowledge of music. As in Brave New World, ideas and themes dominate the style, structure, and characterization of these earlier novels.

Huxley’s next novel, Brave New World (1932), brought him international fame. Written just before the rise of dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin the novel did not incorporate the kind of dark and grim vision of totalitarianism later found in George Orwell’s 1984, which was published in 1948. Huxley later commented on this omission and reconsidered the ideas and themes of Brave New World in a collection of essays called Brave New World Revisited. (1958). He wrote other novels, short stories, and collections of essays over the years which were, for the most part, popular and critically acclaimed. Despite being nearly blind all his life, he also wrote screenplays for Hollywood, most notably an adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Always fascinated by the ideas of consciousness and sanity, in the last ten years of his life Huxley experimented with mysticism, parapsychology, and, under the supervision of a physician friend, the hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and LSD. He wrote of his drug experiences in the book The Doors of Perception (1954). Huxley’s wife died in 1955, and in 1956 he married author and psychotherapist Laura Archera. In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with cancer, the same disease that killed his mother and his first wife, and for the next three years his health steadily declined. He died in Los Angeles, California, where he had been living for several years, on November 22, 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Huxley’s ashes were buried in England in his parents’ grave.