Aldous Huxley
England
Cool, essayistic irony wrapped around a genuinely disturbing premise: ideas dramatized with the same crisp wit he'd have used for a drawing-room satire.
Huxley lost most of his sight to a teenage illness, ending his ambition to become a doctor like his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley and pushing him toward literature instead. At Oxford and after, he wrote glittering satires of Bright Young Things (Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point) skewering the intellectual fashions of 1920s England.
Brave New World (1932) turned that satirical eye forward: a World State that engineers babies by caste, drugs unhappiness away with soma, and keeps its citizens content rather than obedient: a rebuke to the era's cheerful faith in scientific utopia.
He moved to California in 1937, drifted into mysticism and psychedelic experiment, and wrote The Doors of Perception after taking mescaline. He died on November 22, 1963, requesting an injection of LSD on his deathbed, the news swallowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy that same afternoon.
Their books in the atlas
- 1928
Point Counter PointLvl 6satire - 1932
Brave New WorldLvl 4dystopian - 1936
Eyeless in GazaLvl 7bildungsroman - 1962
IslandLvl 5speculative fiction
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