| Aldous Leonard Huxley was born July 26, 1894, in Surrey, England. His father, Leonard, was an editor and minor poet; his mother was the former Julia Arnold. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), Victorian scientist, essayist, defender of Darwin, and an agnostic. A maternal granduncle was Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), celebrated poet and critic. |
| Young Aldous studied first at Eton, and then at Balliol College, Oxford. His youthful desire was to become a doctor, but an eye infection nearly blinded him, and he abandoned the idea of studying medicine. This near tragedy colored the balance of his life, and probably accounts for some of the bitterness in his writing. It also may have been at the root of his perennial aversion to the human body. More immediately, it made him decide against entering business or the professions, and to tap more purely personal and artistic resources in trying to derive a living. As a result of exercises and self-discipline, Huxley's sight became somewhat restored, and he continued at Oxford, taking a degree in 1916. |
| Bothered by poor eyesight for most of his life thereafter, he saw only limited service as an auxiliary in World War I. His keen interpretation of the intellectual reaction to the hostilities and of the uneasy peace on the part of members of the literary group in which he had begun to move proved of much value in early attempts at writing about the enlightened despair and fruitless spiritual efforts prevalent in the twenties. |
| He first tried journalism. His marriage, to Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, took place in 1919. They had one son, Matthew. In the meantime, Huxley wrote and published two volumes of symbolist poetry. Following the war, he flirted briefly with the then-triumphant, predominantly English imagist movement. |
| In 1921, he turned completely to more creative writing as a means of support and self-expression. After two volumes of short stories, he produced a series of novels which were witty and shrewdly skeptical accounts of the mental crisis suffered by the upper middle class and the avant-garde bohemians because hostilities had changed the world, but had not improved it. For his sophisticated satire Huxley came to be considered a prophet of doom for the cult of the amusing then very much in vogue. His novels drew sharply away from realism, showing more and more dispassion and analysis, and permitting ideas to become the motivating forces in his plots. The high-water mark, the semi-realistic Point Counter Point, appeared ten years following World War I, and is usually considered his most celebrated novel. It employed an expository imitation of musical |
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