Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was a 20th century British writer and philosopher probably best known for his 1932 novel Brave New World, though in total Huxley would write over fifty nonfiction and fiction works throughout his life, as well as collections of essays, narratives, and poetry. By the end of his career, Huxley was considered one of the foremost intellectuals of his time, and as both a humanist and a pacifist, his ideas and writing had an immense impact on society, particularly when it came to mysticism and universalism. By his early twenties, Huxley established himself as a successful writer and satirist, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times, and was additionally made the Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. He moved to LA in the later 1930s where he led an incredibly prosperous occupation as a screenwriter, and of course I will most definitely not be leaving out Huxley’s experimentation with drugs, his attachments to the Bloomsbury Group, and short-termed gig as George Orwell’s college professor. But who was Aldous Huxley beyond the world of literature? Well, he was a man with remarkably bad eyesight due to an accident he had as a teenager – honestly, it is believed he was almost completely blind for the majority of his life. Huxley had an extended association with the Vedanta Society in Southern California, which I promise to explain in great detail later on. And then there is the fact that he and Legacy favorite CS Lewis share the same day of death, though unlike CS Lewis, Huxley asked for and was granted LSD just hours before he passed. We are ending season 2 of Legacy with a bang this week, so strap in and get ready for episode 30 covering the life of the brilliant Aldous Huxley.