Aldous Huxley  

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Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, philosopher and a prominent member of the Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian London, The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug, and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He became deeply concerned that humans might become subjugated through the sophisticated use of the mass media or mood-altering drugs, or tragically impacted by misunderstanding or the misapplication of increasingly sophisticated technology.

Huxley later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular, Universalism. He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.

Works

Novels

• Crome Yellow (1921)
• Antic Hay (1923)
• Those Barren Leaves (1925)
• Point Counter Point (1928)
• Brave New World (1932)
• Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
• After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
• Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
• Ape and Essence (1948)
• The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
• Island (1962)

Short stories

• Limbo (1920)
• Mortal Coils (1922)
• Little Mexican (U.S. title: Young Archimedes) (1924)
• Two or Three Graces (1926)
• Brief Candles (1930)
• Jacob's Hands: A Fable (Late 1930s, rediscovered 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood
• Collected Short Stories (1957)

Poetry

• Oxford Poetry (editor) (1916)
• The Burning Wheel (1916)
• Jonah (1917)
• The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918)
• Leda (1920)
• Selected Poems (1925)
• Arabia Infelix and Other Poems (1929)
• The Cicadas and Other Poems (1931)
• First Philosopher's Song
• Collected Poems (1971)

Travel writing

• Along The Road (1925)
• Jesting Pilate (1926) The author recounts his experiences travelling through six countries, offering his observations on their people, cultures and customs.
• Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)

Drama

• The Discovery (adapted from Francis Sheridan, 1924)
• The World of Light (1931)
• Mortal Coils - A Play (stage version of The Gioconda Smile, 1948)
• The Genius and the Goddess (stage version, co-written with Betty Wendel, 1958)
• The Ambassador of Captripedia (1967)
• Now More Than Ever (University of Texas, Austin, 1997)

Essay collections

• On the Margin (1923)
• Along the Road (1925)
• Essays New and Old (1926)
• Proper Studies (1927)
• Do What You Will (1929)
• Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
• Music at Night (1931)
• Texts and Pretexts (1932)
• The Olive Tree (1936)
• Words and their Meanings (1940)
• The Art of Seeing (1942)
• The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
• Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
• Themes and Variations (1950)
• The Doors of Perception (1954)
• Heaven and Hell (1956)
• Adonis and the Alphabet (U.S. title: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956)
• Collected Essays (1958)
• Brave New World Revisited (1958)
• Literature and Science (1963)

Articles written for Vedanta and the West (A publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California from 1938 to 1970)

• Distractions (1941)
• Distractions II (1941)
• Action and Contemplation (1941)
• An Appreciation (1941)
• The Yellow Mustard (1941)
• Lines (1941)
• Some Replections of the Lord's Prayer (1941)
• Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1942)
• Reflections of the Lord's Prayer II (1942)
• Words and Reality (1942)
• Readings in Mysticism (1942)
• Man and Reality (1942)
• The Magical and the Spiritual (1942)
• Religion and Time (1943)
• Idolatry (1943)
• Religion and Temperament (1943)
• A Note on the Bhagavatam (1943)
• Seven Meditations (1943)
• On a Sentence From Shakespeare (1944)
• The Minimum Working Hypothesis (1944)
• From a Notebook (1944)
• The Philosophy of the Saints (1944)
• That Art Thou (1945)
• That Art Thou II (1945)
• The Nature of the Ground (1945)
• The Nature of the Ground II (1945)
• God In the World (1945)
• Origins and Consequences of Some Contemporary Thought-Patterns (1946)
• The Sixth Patriarch (1946)
• Some Reflections on Time (1946)
• Reflections on Progress (1947)
• Further Reflections on Progress (1947)
• William Law (1947)
• Notes on Zen (1947)
• Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (1948)
• A Note on Gandhi (1948)
• Art and Religion (1949)
• Foreword to an Essay on the Indian Philosophy of Peace (1950)
• A Note on Enlightenment (1952)
• Substitutes for Liberation (1952)
• The Desert (1954)
• A Note on Patanjali (1954)
• Who Are We? (1955)
• Foreword to the Supreme Doctrine (1956)
• Knowledge and Understanding (1956)
• The "Inanimate" is Alive (1957)
• Symbol and Immediate Experience (1960)

Philosophy

• Ends and Means (1937)
• The Perennial Philosophy (1944) (ISBN 0-06-057058-X)

Biography and nonfiction

• The Devils of Loudun (1953) (ISBN 0-7867-0368-7)
• Grey Eminence (1941) (ISBN 0-7011-0802-9)
• Selected Letters (2007) (ISBN 1-56663-629-9)

Children's literature

• The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
• The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)

Collections

• Texts and Pretexts (1933)
• Collected Short Stories (1957)
• Collected Essays (1958)
• Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
• The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)