Aldous Huxley

Born into the prominent Huxley family in 1894, Aldous Huxley graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature and began publishing short stories, poetry, and witty social satire. In 1932 he published Brave New World, the novel that would shadow the rest of his career. A pacifist drawn toward philosophical mysticism, he moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and spent his final decades exploring the territories between Western and Eastern thought in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and chronicling his mescaline experiments in The Doors of Perception (1954). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. His last novel, Island (1962), offered the utopian mirror to his famous dystopia; a year later he was dead, leaving behind nearly fifty books and a reputation as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time.