Aldous huxley a biography
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Aldous Huxley: A Biography
In this dazzling conjunction of subject and author, the great English novelist Aldous Huxley, the wholly civilized man, is brought wholly alive in a magnificent full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist Sybille Bedford, an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades. With a pointillistic richness of moment, place, and talk, she re-creates not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central. Despite the almost total loss of his sight at age sixteen, Huxley became a titan and cultural hero of the decades after World War I, on terms with the outstanding writers and artists of his day, from D. H. Lawrence to Stravinksy and Auden. He had two separate and large careers as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point, flag-bearer of England s Bright Young People through the s, and romancer of glittering women; and later, in America, as the increasingly philosophical and utopian t
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The Talented Mr. Huxley
Everything about Huxley seemed large. “During his first years his head was proportionately enormous, so that he could not walk until he was two because he was apt to topple over,” writes biographer Sybille Bedford. Shortly before his death, Huxley confided to a friend that his childhood nickname had been “Ogie,” a substitute for “Ogre.”
But this seems like the kind of exaggeration children so often use to rib each other. In pictures, Huxley looks imposing, but far from ugly. Anita Loos, the American screenwriter, playwright, and author, was impressed by Huxley’s “physical beauty . . . the head of an angel drawn by William Blake.”
His voice, preserved in recordings easily sampled online, was also part of his charm. Huxley spoke like Laurence Olivier—with exacting British diction and an unerring verbal accuracy that few people, then or now, possess in casual conversation. He talked in silver sentences, treating conversation as a form of theater, or even lite
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Aldous Huxley
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Who Was Aldous Huxley?
After a serious illness left him partially blind as a ungdom, Aldous Huxley abandoned his dreams of becoming a scientist to pursue a literary career. In he graduated with honors from Balliol College at Oxford University and published a collection of poems. fem years later he published his debut novel Crome Yellow, which brought him his first taste of success. He followed with several more equally successful satirical novels before publishing the work for which he fryst vatten best known, Brave New World. A dark framtidsperspektiv of the future, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Huxley moved to the United States in and for the rest of his life maintained a prolific output of novels, nonfiction, screenplays and essays.
Early Life
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, England, on July 26, The fourth child in a family with a deep intellectual history, his grandfather was the noted biologist and naturalist T. H. Huxley,