Aldous Huxley: A Biography - Hardcover

Murray, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312302371 ISBN 13: 9780312302375

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003

Synopsis

A reassessment of the life and work of the celebrated author considers his visionary writings as evidenced by Brave New World while considering how the book was written in the wake of his move to California and his experimentation with mysticism and psychedelic drugs. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Nicholas Murray's Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual looks at the life of the author of Brave New World which, along with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, is one of the most frightening visions of the future of the human race. Of the two, Huxley's book is much funnier, and when it comes to matters such as genetic engineering and TV culture, more accurate.

This biography reveals the origins of Huxley's light but decisive literary touch. It came from a fascination with science (especially alternative science) which he inherited from his famous evolutionist grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. And it came from Huxley's own exposure to the wry iconoclasm of the Bloomsbury crowd in the years around the First World War. Murray charts the life of this latter-day Victorian gentleman of letters with pace and insight.

Huxley was always on the move, flitting between Italy, Paris, London and California. Beautifully dressed, he seems to have changed his ideas as often as his clothes, flirting with French symbolism, Oswald Mosley's fascism, Walt Disney and LSD. Like his contemporary Bertrand Russell, his views on everything were sought out by everybody. And, inevitably, his sex life was as busy and as free as his intellectual imagination.

Nicholas Murray passes up the ample opportunities to debunk Huxley's often naïve and snobbish pronouncements, and instead offers a sympathetic account of a man beset by poor eyesight, emotional insecurity and always in search of a brave new world of his own. --Miles Taylor

Review:

This excellent biography has come at the right time (Jeanette Winterson, THE TIMES)

Generous and intelligent biography (J.G. Ballard, GUARDIAN)

A richly detailed, thoroughly sympathetic portrait (SUNDAY HERALD)

[Murray] provides an appropriately multifaceted portrait of Huxley, emphasising the continuities in his life as well as the radical open-mindedness that informed it. (SUNDAY TIMES)

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312302371
• ISBN 13: 9780312302375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480