This allows them to maintain a satisfactory happiness a contentment with their lives, but never a moment of joy or despair. Rather, the members of each caste copulate with each other almost constantly. Because everyone has been rendered infertile, there is no fear of pregnancy. Mind you, in his novel, sex is totally divorced from procreation. Where Orwell’s 1984 depicts a world in which sex is forbidden (there is a memorable scene where Winston Smith fantasizes about simply touching the knee of a woman), Huxley’s dystopian vision has sex placed at the center of everyone’s lives. The book begins at a hatchery and conditioning center for human beings. What first impressed me about the author of Brave New World was his keen sense of the future. This is the Huxley I have met an account of the conversations we have had. What follows is not Huxley in and of himself. This is rather an account of how Huxley shaped my mind. Huxley was not a conservative, nor was he a Christian. I will not here attempt to present the whole Huxley. That request came fifty years ago today, when Huxley died, along with C.S. Unlike most of my conservative friends, who reminisce about their first time reading Edmund Burke, or Alexis de Tocqueville, I owe much of my worldview to a man whose last request was for an injection of LSD. Huxley holds a special prominence in my life. But, at least they aren’t hypnotized by the allure of sexual pleasure. Simply being brainy does not make someone into a good person. In the case of being an intellectual, Huxley doesn’t clarify that thinking, purely for its own sake, is not a good to be sought. The vice is less obvious: he doesn’t have a cogent alternative to propose. The virtue is plain: he punctures a potent modern myth.
Like the rest of his canon, the above quote from Aldous Huxley has an inherent virtue and an inherent vice. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.Īlso includes several ultra-rare previously unheard conversations with the esteemed intellectual.“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” -Aldous Huxley
By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. Huxley spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He wrote nearly fifty books, both novels and non-fiction works-as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.īorn into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990.Īuthor Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's 1884.īrave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published a year later.
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