61 Facts About Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher.

Aldous Huxley wrote nearly 50 books, both novels and non-fiction works, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.

Aldous Huxley spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Aldous Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.

Aldous Huxley grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as The Perennial Philosophy, which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline.

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Aldous Huxley was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley, who edited The Cornhill Magazine, and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School.

Aldous Huxley was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently "[contemplated] the strangeness of things".

Aldous Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming.

Aldous Huxley was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill.

Aldous Huxley contracted the eye disease Keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".

In October 1913, Aldous Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature.

Aldous Huxley volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye.

Aldous Huxley edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours.

Aldous Huxley taught French for a year at Eton College, where Eric Blair and Steven Runciman were among his pupils.

Aldous Huxley was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class.

Aldous Huxley worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England.

Aldous Huxley completed his first novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist.

Aldous Huxley's first published novels were social satires, Crome Yellow, Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928).

Aldous Huxley accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys, at Garsington.

In Brave New World, set in a dystopian London, Aldous Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning.

In 1937, Aldous Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Aldous Huxley, and friend Gerald Heard.

Aldous Huxley lived in the U S, mainly in southern California, until his death, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means.

In 1938, Aldous Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired.

Aldous Huxley provided an introduction to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, The First and Last Freedom.

Aldous Huxley became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle.

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Not long afterwards, Aldous Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.

Aldous Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.

Aldous Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College.

Aldous Huxley spent much time at the college, which is in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

Aldous Huxley was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll.

On 21 October 1949, Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is".

When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U S and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act, the judge had to adjourn the proceedings.

Nevertheless, he remained in the U S In 1959, Huxley turned down an offer to be made a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without putting forward a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while another brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974.

Aldous Huxley was one of the most highly civilized human beings I had ever met.

Aldous Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself.

Biographer Milton Birnbaum wrote that Aldous Huxley "ended by embracing both science and Eastern religion".

In 1944, Aldous Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

From 1941 until 1960, Aldous Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West, published by the society.

Aldous Huxley occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples.

In early 1953, Aldous Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline.

Aldous Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and supervised Aldous Huxley's session in southern California.

Aldous Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception.

Circa 1939, Aldous Huxley encountered the Bates method, in which he was instructed by Margaret Darst Corbett.

In 1940, Aldous Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northern Los Angeles County.

Aldous Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert.

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Aldous Huxley reported that, for the first time in more than 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain.

Aldous Huxley even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch.

For example, some ten years after publication of The Art of Seeing, in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Aldous Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty:.

For instance, although Aldous Huxley did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens.

Laura Aldous Huxley proceeded to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Aldous Huxley's vision.

Nevertheless, the topic of Aldous Huxley's eyesight has continued to endure similar, significant controversy.

Aldous Huxley married on 10 July 1919 Maria Nys, a Belgian epidemiologist from Bellem, a village near Aalter, he met at Garsington, Oxfordshire, in 1919.

In 1956, Aldous Huxley married Laura Archera, an author, as well as a violinist and psychotherapist.

Aldous Huxley's told the story of their marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, Huxley on Huxley.

Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" both at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute.

Aldous Huxley was a close friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, and was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School, now Besant Hill School, of Happy Valley, in Ojai, California.

On 9 April 1962 Aldous Huxley was informed he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, the senior literary organisation in Britain, and he accepted the title via letter on 28 April 1962.

The society invited Aldous Huxley to appear at a banquet and give a lecture at Somerset House, London, in June 1963.

Aldous Huxley wrote a draft of the speech he intended to give at the society; however, his deteriorating health meant he was not able to attend.

On his deathbed, unable to speak owing to advanced laryngeal cancer, Aldous Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.

Aldous Huxley had been a long-time friend of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who dedicated his last orchestral composition to Aldous Huxley.