Wandering into Brave New World explores the historical contexts and contemporary sources of Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel which, seventy years after its initial publication remains the best known and ...most discussed dystopian work of the twentieth century. This new study addresses a number of questions which still remain open. Did his round-the-world trip in 1925-1926 provide material for the novel? Did India's caste system contribute to the novel's human levels? Is there an overarching pattern to the names of the novel/s characters? Has the role of Hollywood in the novel been underestimated? Is Lenina Crown a representative 1920s "flapper"? Did Huxley have knowledge of and sources for his Indian reservation characters and scenes quite independent of and more accurate than those of D. H. Lawrence's writings? Did Huxley's visit to Borneo contribute anything to the novel? New research allows substantive answers and even explains why Huxley linked such figures as Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud. It also shows how the novel overcomes its intense grounding in 1920s political turmoil to escape into the timelessness of dystopian fiction.
"An outstanding book."-James Sexton "A welcome and necessary update of the life of one of the twentieth century's most provocative intellectuals."-Dana Sawyer A rich and lucid account of Aldous ...Huxley's life and work. Aldous Huxley was one of the twentieth century's most prescient thinkers. This new biography is a rich and lucid account that charts the different phases of Huxley's career: from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the postwar generation, to the committed pacifist of the 1930s, the spiritual seeker of the 1940s, the psychedelic sage of the 1950s-who affirmed the spiritual potential of mescaline and LSD-to the New Age prophet of Island. While Huxley is still best known as the author of Brave New World, Jake Poller argues that it is The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, and Island-Huxley's blueprint for a utopian society-that have had the most cultural impact.
Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World ...and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author?This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle.This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.
Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality offers an analysis of Huxley's spiritual interests, spanning both mysticism and Western esotericism. With this methodology, Jake Poller generates new ...insights into Huxley's work and draws revealing parallels between Huxley's ideas and the New Age.
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley (18941963), Temporaries and Eternals focuses on the music column that Huxley wrote for The Weekly Westminster Gazette in 192223. ...Readers of Huxleys novels, essays and travel writing will be aware of the wealth of musical detail in these works, and this book suggests that such references can only be fully understood in the context of the opinions voiced in Huxleys music criticism. Not only does Huxleys column offer a fascinati.
Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters examines Huxley's political thinking through an analysis of Brave New World, his most successful political manifesto. This bookhighlights his ...contributions to contemporary political theory.
I define fictional drugs as non-existent medicines, intended for human use, that have been invented for the purposes of some forms of fiction, usually novels, but also plays or films, including TV ...dramas. Here I discuss four sources of information about such drugs: Robert Heinlein’s novella Logic of Empire (1941; rhira or happywater); Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965: melange or spice and Water of Life); Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932; soma); and J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937–49; athelas). Apart from the last, these examples illustrate the psychotropic nature of many fictional drugs.
