Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley: English novelist, essayist, critic, and poet. On July 26, 1894, Aldous was born of Leonard and Julia Huxley in England. The infamous Huxley family possessed both scientific and literary fame throughout Europe. As a teenage, Aldous developed a bizarre eye disease which left him blind for over two years. This traumatic event changed Aldous's career as a medical doctor to a writer instead. "…I should infallibly have killed myself in the much more strenuous profession of medicine." But he was used to work, even in the literary world.

During the 1920's, he lived in Italy and France, and then immigrated to the United States in 1937. Huxley's own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Growing up, he was seen as different, showing an alertness, and intelligence, a superiority. He was a respected and loved individual. He felt that heredity made each individual unique, and the uniqueness of the individual was essential to freedom. His feelings and emotions are displayed in his work, Brave New World. Like his family, and the Alphas of Brave New World, Huxley felt a moral obligation to fight the idea that happiness could be achieved through class. When Huxley was 14 years old, he experienced a traumatic loss in his life; his mother died. One can see his loss and his sense of the transience of human happiness in Brave New World. As mentioned before,...