Book description
In his 1932 classic dystopian novel,
Brave New World
, Aldous Huxley depicted a future society in thrall to science and
regulated by sophisticated methods of social control. Nearly thirty
years later in Brave New World Revisited
, Huxley checked the progress of his prophecies against reality and
argued that many of his fictional fantasies had grown uncomfortably
close to the truth. Brave New World Revisited
includes Huxley's views on overpopulation, propaganda, advertising and
government control, and is an urgent and powerful appeal for the defence
of individualism still alarmingly relevant today. Aldous Huxley was
born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry
and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel,
Crome Yellow
(1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly
followed by Antic Hay
(1923), Those Barren Leaves
(1925) and Point Counter Point
(1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but
ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society.
The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World
(published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of
scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays,
collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night
(1931) and Ends and Means
(1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live
in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the
West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the
key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual
through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life
through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for
the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction
(Time Must Have a Stop
, 1944 and Island
, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy
, 1945, Grey Eminence
, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, The
Doors of Perception
, 1954. Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.
