Aldous Huxley: Biography

Aldous Huxley was born into an English family in 1894. He had access to elite early education, and eventually graduated from Oxford. Although his dreams of practicing medicine could not be realized due to partial blindness in one eye, Huxley went on to become a famous academic. He is still regarded as one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times and is primarily known for his interest in and writings on mysticism, dystopias, and utopias. Huxley, as his younger brother put it, was deeply interested in “the strangeness of things,” and his works reflect as much.

Aldous Huxley spent his childhood and youth in England and later moved to the US, where he lived until his death. He was married twice and succumbed to laryngeal cancer when he was 69 years old. Although the cancer took away his ability to speak, it could not extinguish his desire for writing. In his lifetime, Huxley was friends with several luminaries across various fields, such as DH Lawrence, Eric Blair (George Orwell), Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bertrand Russell, and Igor Stravinsky.

Three decades after he wrote the dystopian Brave New World, Huxley wrote Island, his final work of fiction, and unlike Brave New World the latter explores aspects of a utopian world.