Aldous Huxley: A Biography
- ISBN-10
- 1429978503
- ISBN-13
- 9781429978507
- Series
- Aldous Huxley
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 480
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2003-03-24
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Author
- Nicholas Murray
Description
When Aldous Huxley died on November 22, 1963, on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and wide-ranging English writers of the twentieth century. Associated in the public mind with his dystopian satire, Brave New World, and experimentation with drugs that preceded the psychedelic, a term he invented, era of the 1960s, Huxley seemed to embody the condition of twentieth-century man in his restless curiosity, his search for meaning in a post-religious age, and his concern about the misuses of science and the future of the planet. But Huxley was born when Queen Victoria was on the British throne. He was the grandson of the great Victorian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley "Darwin's bulldog," and the great-nephew of the great poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Exiled in the Californian sun, he never ceased to think of himself as part of a tradition that could be traced back to the Victorian public intellectuals. This biography of Huxley---the first in thirty years---draws on a substantial amount of unpublished material, as well as numerous interviews with his family and friends. It is a portrait of a daring and iconoclastic novelist; a man hampered by semi-blindness, who spent a restless life in search of personal enlightenment. Nicholas Murray charts Huxley's Bloomsbury years, his surprising and complex relationship with D. H. Lawrence, and his emigration to America in the late 1930s, where he pursued a career as a screenwriter while continuing his fascination with mysticism and religion. Huxley's private life was also unconventional, and this book reveals for the first time the extraordinary story of the ménage à trois including Huxley, his remarkable wife, Maria, and the Bloomsbury socialite and mistress of Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson. Huxley emerges from this new biography as one of the most intriguing and complex figures of twentieth-century English writing---novelist, poet, biographer, philosopher, social and political thinker. In an era of intense specialization he remained a free-ranging thinker, unconfined by conventional categories, concerned to communicate his insights in ordinary language---a very English intellectual.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Island
By Aldous HuxleyLook for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
-
Aldous Huxley, a Biography
By Dana SawyerAn in-depth look at Huxley's life and the development of his philosophical thought. The first look at Huxley primarily as a philosopher rather than a novelist.
-
Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
By Aldous HuxleyMoksha, a Sanskrit word meaning "liberation," is a collection of the prophetic and visionary writings of Aldous Huxley.
-
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell: With Biography and Illustrated Mental Exercises
By Aldous HuxleyRemastered to include Illustrated exercises, a biography of Aldous Huxley, and including the full essay of Heaven and Hell, and The Doors to Perception, this book is a great gift to those who are unfamiliar with his work, or may have ...
-
The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West
By Aldous HuxleyAn inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every ...
-
Aldous Huxley
By Harold BloomA collection of critical essays on Aldous Huxley and his work.
-
Aldous Huxley Annual
By Jerome Meckier, Bernfried NugelThe concluding section of the book consists of several articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 10)
-
Letters of Aldous Huxley
By Aldous HuxleyAnalyse : (p. 518) Dans une lettre du 2 avril 1945 à Victoria Ocampo, à propos de Drieu la Rochelle qui vient de mourir, Huxley fait un rapprochement entre lui...
-
Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic
By Jerome MeckierDespite rallying cries like Parini's, poetry, Huxley maintained, can never hold a candle to enlightenment—unless it literally serves as such a candle. In The Role of the Poet in Early Societies, Morton Bloomfield and Charles Dunn ...
-
Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality
By Jake PollerBeppo walking up and down the rows, for ever – his sweating self, but worse”.142 It is Dr James Miller who sets Anthony on the spiritual path. Miller (although previously married) is but the first of several celibate guru figures in ...