Biography of Aldous Huxley Essay

Aldous Leonard Huxley was innate(p) on July 26, 1894 in Surrey, England, as the third son of Dr. Leonard Huxley and Julia Arnold. Huxley was born into a long line of scientists and intellectuals. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley had the last name Darwins Bulldog for his fierce defense of evolutionary science and for his dearest for teaching Victorian scientific advancements to Britains working classes. Aldous Huxley was also connect to the poet Matthew Arnold on his mothers side of the family. These two disciplines, literature and science, converged at the end of the Victorian era and characterize Huxleys own life and ambitions as an author, journalist, and humanist. Educated at Eton, Aldous Huxley was forced to leave the school at the age of seventeen due to an affliction of the eyes. He was partially projection screen for two or three years and therefore was un equal to acquit the rigorous scientific training he had undertaken.Though problems with his eyes would confront with him for the rest of his life, Huxley was able to attend Oxford where he received a power point in English literature. Huxleys career began in journalism and include music and artistic criticism as well as phonograph recording reviews. He also began writing poems, essays, and historical pieces. Huxleys first adit to British intellectual society occurred while working as a farm laborer at Garsington Manor, the site of the Bloomsbury Society, a group of earth intellectuals that included Bertrand Russell. There he would marry Maria Nys and they would have whiz child, Matthew Huxley. He also wrote his first playscript, a volume of poetry called The ruin Wheel. While working as an slewor for House and Garden during the1920s, Huxley wrote legion(predicate) novels including bald-faced New World.Huxley spent several years in Italy where he formed a friendship with D.H. Lawrence. They would remain close friends and Huxley would later edit Lawrences collected letters after his d eath. In 1937, Huxley moved jeopardize to the United States to live in Hollywood, California, where he helped write scripts for several Hollywood movies of the time, although he never had a lasting career in movies. afterward World War II, he famously became involved with the early psychotropic drug movement. Huxley was an early proponent of the use of LSD, mescaline, and peyote for their mind-altering effects. His 1954 book The Doors of Perception argued that through the use of psychedelic drugs, people would be able to cleanse the doors of perception in order to embrace the infinite worldly concern of the world.A controversial figure for most of his life, Huxley died from cancer on November 22, 1963, hardly hours after President John F. Kennedys assassination in Dallas, Texas. By the time of his death, he was embraced in some circles as an intellectual and generator of the highest class, especially for his creation of the dystopian fantasy in his novel Brave New World and hi s engagement of the theme of commercialization in sophisticated society. Others, however, saw him as a pseudo-scientist for his work in mystical traditions and his insisting on experiencing alternate realities through meditation, Eastern religions, and drug use. For his accomplishments, Huxley received the stage of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959.