Aldous Huxley

"[A] generous and intelligent biography" of the twentieth-century luminary and author of Brave New World ( The Guardian, UK). When Aldous Huxley died in 1963, he was considered one of the most important English writers of the twentieth century. Known for his dystopian satire, Brave New World, and his experimentation with drugs that preceded the 1960s psychedelic (a term he invented) era, Huxley seemed to embody the condition of twentieth-century man in his restless curiosity, his search for meaning in a post-religious age, and his concern about the misuses of science and the future of the planet. This biography of Huxley draws on unprecedented access to the author's private papers, as well as numerous interviews with his family and friends. It is a portrait of a daring and iconoclastic novelist; a man hampered by semi-blindness, who spent a restless life in search of personal enlightenment. Nicholas Murray charts Huxley's Bloomsbury years, his surprising and complex relationship with D. H. Lawrence, and his emigration to America in the late 1930s, where he pursued a career as a screenwriter while continuing his fascination with mysticism and religion. Huxley's private life was also unconventional, and this book reveals for the first time the extraordinary story of the ménage à trois including Huxley, his remarkable wife, Maria, and the Bloomsbury socialite, Mary Hutchinson. Huxley is revealed as one of the most intriguing and complex figures of twentieth-century English writing. In an era of intense specialization he transcended conventional categories, to become an influential novelist, poet, biographer, philosopher, social and political thinker.