ALDOUS LEONARD HUXLEY

By Fabrizio Trulli & Marilena Zarrillo

Aldous Huxley was born in  Goldalming (Great Britain) July 26th 1894. He wanted to become a doctor, but a serious illness to the cornea forced him to leave the scientific field and he devoted to the study  of the English literature and philology. He graduated at the Balliol College of Oxford in 1915. He started to publish critics of various kinds on the magazine Athenaeum and on the Westminster Gazette; with his friend Lawrence, he lived in Italy from 1923 to 1930 and after the death of Lawrence he published the collection of letters of his friend.  After his Italian stay, the writer took an interest in politics and in 1939 he published his masterpiece as well as his more known book: Brave New World. After some months spent in New York he succeeded in recovering his sight partially. In 1955 his first wife Maria Nys died,  and after one year  he  married to Laura Archea. In the fifties, Huxley abandoned the fiction to devote more and more to philosophy. He deepened the exoteric studies and he tried to unite in a single experience the scientific knowledge with that of mysticism. In 1960 he discovered to have a cancer at the tongue and, after one year, a fire destroyed all his books. In 1963 he died in Hollywood on November 22. Huxley was always involved in the political and cultural debate of his time and demonstrated big enthusiasm for the scientific discoveries. In the first compositions the writer contemplated the English society after the first world war. The works of this period are: Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves. During the Italian stay he wrote Point Counter Point, that represents a radical change in his philosophical convictions. In 1932 he wrote "Brave New World", a text that isn't  a novel but a harvest of wise man in which the author exposes his own social and political ideas. Huxley was above all a critic, a poet, a playwright and an essayist; his most important works are: The Perennial Philosophy, The doors of perception and his last book was Island.

For other information about Huxley and his works you can visit these links:

http://www.alibris.com           

http://www.huxley.net    

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk

http://www.literature-web.net

http://www.lidiavianu.scriptmania.com