Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Q. Who was Aldous Huxley

A. The English novelist and essayist Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, on 26 July 1894. He came from a distinguished scientific and literary family: his grandfather on his father's side was the eminent biologist T.H. Huxley, who had helped to develop the theory of evolution. His father was the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley, while his mother was the sister of the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous educator and the real-life headmaster of Rugby School, who became a character in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.

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Huxley originally intended to study medicine, but was prevented by an eye ailment, keratitis, which struck him at the age of 16, leaving him near-blind for the rest of his life and only able to read with difficulty. After Eton he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he turned to literature, meeting writers such as Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell and becoming close friends with D.H. Lawrence.

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Huxley published two volumes of poetry while still a student, and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. His literary reputation was firmly established by his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), a witty satire on the intellectual pretensions of his time, and thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing.

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He travelled throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe - especially Italy - India and America, finally settling in California in 1937, where he remained for much of the rest of his life.

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In 1938 he went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. Among his film credits is an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which starred the young Laurence Olivier.

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Huxley had a deep distrust of 20th-century politics and technology, as well as strong sense of the transience of life, a trait perhaps exacerbated by the death of his mother when he was 14. He was essentially a moral philosopher, and became preoccupied with how both individuals and society at large could retain a degree of sanity. He felt that Western society was empty and aimless, too concerned with materialism, and started to explore Eastern mysticism as an antidote.

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During the 1950s he famously became curious about the affects of hallucinogenic drugs, in particular mescaline and LSD - there is even a tale that he took a trip on his deathbed. He wrote about the experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956).

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In 1959 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize given every five years. Previous recipients had included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Theodore Dreiser.

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Huxley died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

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Q. We've all heard of Brave New World, but what else did he write

A. He wrote 47 books in his writing career. Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) are works in a similar vein to Crome Yellow, witty and malicious satires on the pretensions of the English literary and intellectual coteries. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) portrays its central character's conversion from selfish isolation to transcendental mysticism, and marks the beginning of Huxley's exploration of this area in his fiction. The Perennial Philosophy (1946), an anthology of texts with his own commentaries on mystical and religious approaches to a sane life in a sane society, continues to reflect this preoccupation.

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Huxley's most important later works are The Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of a historical incident in which a group of 17th-century French nuns were allegedly the victims of demonic possession, the two mescaline books and Island (1962), a novel that was an antidote to Brave New World. It portrays a good Utopia, where the population uses a perfected version of LSD in a religious way.

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Q. And Brave New World

A. Huxley's deep distrust of the trends in politics and technology found expression in Brave New World (1932), a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system. Where Island is a Utopia, Brave New World is a dystopia, in which the complete control of society has robbed mankind of any humanity, even though the population seems happy to be controlled.

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Often compared to George Orwell's 1984, Huxley himself said, 'The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell.' And it's true. Huxley's tale is of a world without soul, if bland and unchallenging, but it lacks the utter desperation of Orwell's vision.

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In 1958 He published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas found in the original novel, such as overpopulation, overorganization and psychological techniques from salesmanship to sleep-teaching. He saw all these as tools that governments could abuse to deprive people of freedom, something he wanted people to resist.

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Q. What about the Doors