Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual - Hardcover

Murray, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316854921 ISBN 13: 9780316854924

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2002

Synopsis

The son of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille his eyesight then improved enough for him to start writing, and by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty and daring novels like CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923) and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). But it is as the author of his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future society, BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), that Huxley is remembered today. A truly visionary book, it was a watershed in Huxley's world-view as his later work became more and more optimistic - coinciding with his move to California and experimentation with mysticism and psychedelic drugs later in life. Nicholas Murray's brilliant new book has the greatest virtue of literary biographies: it makes you want to go out and read its subject's work all over again. A fascinating reassessment of one of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century.

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: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0316854921
• ISBN 13: 9780316854924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512