SparkNotes - Brave New World: SparkNotes Literature Guide

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A ldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England, on July 26, 1894, to an illustrious family deeply rooted in Englands literary and scientific tradition. Huxleys father, Leonard Huxley, was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a well-known biologist who gained the nickname Darwins bulldog for championing Charles Darwins evolutionary ideas. His mother, Julia Arnold, was related to the important nineteenth-century poet and essayist Matthew Arnold.

Raised in this family of scientists, writers, and teachers (his father was a writer and teacher, and his mother a schoolmistress), Huxley received an excellent education, first at home, then at Eton, providing him with access to numerous fields of knowledge. Huxley was an avid student, and during his lifetime he was renowned as a generalist, an intellectual who had mastered the use of the English language but was also informed about cutting-edge developments in science and other fields. Although much of his scientific understanding was superficialhe was easily convinced of findings that remained somewhat on the fringe of mainstream sciencehis education at the intersection of science and literature allowed him to integrate current scientific findings into his novels and essays in a way that few other writers of his time were able to do.

Aside from his education, another major influence on Huxleys life and writing was an eye disease contracted in his teenage years that left him almost blind. As a teenager Huxley had dreamed about becoming a doctor, but the degeneration of his eyesight prevented him from pursuing his chosen career. It also severely restricted the activities he could pursue. Because of his near blindness, he depended heavily on his first wife, Maria, to take care of him. Blindness and vision are motifs that permeate much of Huxleys writing.

After graduating from Oxford in 1916, Huxley began to make a name for himself writing satirical pieces about the British upper class. Though these writings were skillful and gained Huxley an audience and literary name, they were generally considered to offer little depth beyond their lightweight criticisms of social manners. Huxley continued to write prolifically, working as an essayist and journalist, and publishing four volumes of poetry before beginning to work on novels. Without giving up his other writing, beginning in 1921 , Huxley produced a series of novels at an astonishing rate: Crome Yellow was published in 1921 , followed by Antic Hay in 1923 , Those Barren Leaves in 1925 , and Point Counter Point in 1928 . During these years, Huxley left his early satires behind and became more interested in writing about subjects with deeper philosophical and ethical significance. Much of his work deals with the conflict between the interests of the individual and society, often focusing on the problem of self-realization within the context of social responsibility. These themes reached their zenith in Huxleys Brave New World, published in 1932 . His most enduring work imagined a fictional future in which free will and individuality have been sacrificed in deference to complete social stability.

Brave New World marked a step in a new direction for Huxley, combining his skill for satire with his fascination with science to create a dystopian (anti-utopian) world in which a totalitarian government controlled society by the use of science and technology. Through its exploration of the pitfalls of linking science, technology, and politics, and its argument that such a link will likely reduce human individuality, Brave New World deals with similar themes as George Orwells famous novel 1984. Orwell wrote his novel in 1949, after the dangers of totalitarian governments had been played out to tragic effect in World War II, and during the great struggle of the Cold War and the arms race which so powerfully underlined the role of technology in the modern world. Huxley anticipated all of these developments. Hitler came to power in Germany a year after the publication of Brave New World. World War II broke out six years after. The atomic bomb was dropped thirteen years after its publication, initiating the Cold War and what President Eisenhower referred to as a frightening buildup of the military-industrial complex. Huxleys novel seems, in many ways, to prophesize the major themes and struggles that dominated life and debate in the second half of the twentieth century, and continue to dominate it in the twenty-first.

After publishing Brave New World, Huxley continued to live in England, making frequent journeys to Italy. In 1937 Huxley moved to California. An ardent pacifist, he had become alarmed at the growing military buildup in Europe, and determined to remove himself from the possibility of war. Already famous as a writer of novels and essays, he tried to make a living as a screenwriter. He had little success. Huxley never seemed to grasp the requirements of the form, and his erudite literary style did not translate well to the screen.

In the late forties, Huxley started to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline. He also maintained an interest in occult phenomena, such as hypnotism, sances, and other activities occupying the border between science and mysticism. Huxleys experiments with drugs led him to write several books that had profound influences on the sixties counterculture. The book he wrote about his experiences with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, influenced a young man named Jim Morrison and his friends, and they named the band they formed The Doors. (The phrase, the doors of perception comes from a William Blake poem called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) In his last major work, Island, published in 1962, Huxley describes a doomed utopia called Pala that serves as a contrast to his earlier vision of dystopia. A central aspect of Palas ideal culture is the use of a hallucinogenic drug called moksha, which provides an interesting context in which to view soma, the drug in Brave New World that serves as one tool of the totalitarian state. Huxley died on November 22, 1963, in Los Angeles.

Brave New World belongs to the genre of utopian literature. A utopia is an imaginary society organized to create ideal conditions for human beings, eliminating hatred, pain, neglect, and all of the other evils of the world.

The word utopia comes from Sir Thomas Mores novel Utopia ( 1516 ), and it is derived from Greek roots that could be translated to mean either good place or no place. Books that include descriptions of utopian societies were written long before Mores novel, however. Platos Republic is a prime example. Sometimes the societies described are meant to represent the perfect society, but sometimes utopias are created to satirize existing societies, or simply to speculate about what life might be like under different conditions. In the 1920 s, just before