Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow (1921) is a novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Inspired by his stay at Garsington Manor with members of the Bloomsbury Group, Crome Yellow, Huxley's debut novel, satirizes the society of England's intellectual and political elite. In addition to its autobiographical content, the novel investigates such themes as spirituality, the nature and composition of art, and the fear of a dystopian future. Invited to spend part of the summer...

The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it details his taking mescaline in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

Aldous Huxley is back in the old smooth, mythological world, consecrated by a thousand poets. He pays occasional tribute to ugly fact in the course of this poem, but he is at home while describing Leda with her maids bathing in Eurotas, her shining body, and the clear deep pools! The modern terror of the too-perfect world makes him dwell longer, and more humorously, than his predecessors would have done, upon Jove tossing on his Olympian couch, tortured...

Portraying the revolving clash between class ideals, Antic Hay is a stunning cultural critique on life in London circa 1923. With a sharp comedic edge, author Aldous Huxley delivers a novel of ideas aimed at characterizing the unsettling times following the end of World War I. With over-the-top characters, and ensuing brutish conversations, Antic Hay doesn't follow a typical narrative arc. Huxley's work portrays a world entirely fabricated on...

SOME people I know can look back over the long series of their childish holidays and see in their memory always a different landscape, chalk downs or Swiss mountains; a blue and sunny sea or the grey, ever-troubled fringe of the ocean; heathery moors under the cloud with far away a patch of sunlight on the hills, golden as happiness and, like happiness, remote, precarious, impermanent, or the untroubled waters of Como, the cypresses and the Easter...

In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect...

Over the course of his career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an atheistic outlook toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underlies the previously unpublished play “Now More Than Ever”. Written in 1932-1933 just after “Brave New World”, “Now More Than Ever” is a response to the social, economic, and political...

This short story collection by the author of Brave New World features a novella that "stands among Huxley's most ingenious inventions" (Los Angeles Review of Books). In "Two or Three Graces," the title novella of this collection, Aldous Huxley offers a virtuoso performance of narrative structure and character development. Beginning in Paris, music critic Dick Wilkes meets a succession of terribly entertaining bores as he travels to England. But after...

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. Aldous Huxley

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity-these are the elements of Aldous Huxley's caustic and entertaining satire on man's desire to live indefinitely. With his customary wit and intellectual sophistication, Huxley pursues his characters in their quest for the eternal, finishing on a note of horror. "This is Mr. Huxley's Hollywood novel, and you might expect it to be fantastic,...