Post #2

Huxley was a hugely prolific writer and thinker. He wrote novels, short stories, essays, movie scripts, and poetry, about a wide range of thought provoking subjects, over a career spanning several decades.

He worked for several years at a chemical plant, and later claimed his experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" as influential. Because of his poor eyesight, he was disqualified from service in the first world war and worked as a farmhand at Garsington Manor, where he started a family and wrote his first published novel Crome Yellow, followed by his next novel "Antic Hay." His third novel, Point Counter Point, which he wrote after moving his family to Italy, was much more complex than his previous two novels (which were essentially lighthearted jabs at fashion-oriented society.)

Before moving to California, he lived in Guatemala and El Salvador while he wrote Brave New World, possibly his most popular novel which centers around a theme Huxley had obviously long been interested in but had only briefly explored a few times in his career: the thought that what we should fear most is complete satisfaction. He later wrote to George Orwell, one of his former French students, who had gone on to write 1984. While mostly congratulatory, Huxley wrote that "[w]ithin the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience."

While in the US, Huxley spent a lot of time ingesting certain chemicals in an intellectual, research-oriented environment. Huxley met many notable members of the early academic psychedelic scene, including occultist Aleister Crowley and "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD" Alfred Hubbard. Huxley recorded his insights in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

"Aldous Huxley - Biography." Online-Literature.com. 1 May. 2010. http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/.

"entry for Brave New World." Wikipedia. 1 May. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World/.