Download or read book Aldous Huxley a Biography written by Dana Sawyer and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aldous Huxley, whose grandfather was T.H. Huxley, the renowned scientist, and whose great uncle was Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet, was one of the most respected intellectuals of the 20th Century. A close friend of T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Edwin Hubble, Igor Stravinsky, Bertrand Russell, Timothy Leary, and others, Huxley helped shape the modern mind, first with his satirical novels and later with his moral philosophy and provocative theories regarding humankind's destiny. Earlier biographers focused on Huxley's eleven novels, while this book traces his trajectory as a theorist who framed the "perennial philosophy," the view that all religions have a spiritual core found in the writings of their mystics. Huxley's interests in Asian Religions, psychedelic drugs, and the dangers of mass society, environmental destruction and rampant technology are all covered in Sawyer's short, readable and critically acclaimed biography. The Center for Aldous Huxley Studies at the University of Munster, Germany, called the book, "The best-to-date explanation and appraisal of Huxley's metaphysical position." This enjoyable biography makes clear why and how Huxley became a key influence on such contemporary authors as Ken Wilber, Huston Smith, Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, Alex Grey, Andrew Harvey and Stanislav Grof.
Download or read book Aldous Huxley written by Sybille Bedford and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist, an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades. She re-creates not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central. "One of the great classic English biographies...as forbidding to competitors as Boswell's life of Johnson." Philip Hensher, Spectator."
Download or read book Aldous Huxley written by Nicholas Murray and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-06-04 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grandson of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille his eyesight then improved enough for him to start writing, and by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty and daring novels like CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923) and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). But it is as the author of his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future society, BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), that Huxley is remembered today. A truly visionary book, it was a watershed in Huxley's world-view as his later work became more and more optimistic - coinciding with his move to California and experimentation with mysticism and psychedelic drugs later in life. Nicholas Murray's brilliant new book has the greatest virtue of literary biographies: it makes you want to go out and read its subject's work all over again. A fascinating reassessment of one of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book This Timeless Moment written by Laura Archera Huxley and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before "turn on, tune in, drop out" became the credo of the American counterculture, Aldous Huxley was using mescaline and LSD in controlled, carefully documented experiments. Accounts of those psychedelic experiences, along with his interest in Eastern mystical religions, accompany the moving story of Aldous Huxley's later years with his wife, Laura. Huxley's fascination with the spiritual world remained with him throughout his life and never wavered through his final illness in 1963. THIS TIMELESS MOMENT takes the reader into the lively mind of one of the most profound thinkers of any generation.
Download or read book Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic novel of a perfectly engineered society is “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the twentieth century” (The Wall Street Journal). Half a millennium from now, in the World State, the watchword is that every one belongs to every one else. No matter what class of human you are bred to be—from the intellectual Alphas to the Epsilons who provide the manual labor—you are a part of the efficient, well-oiled whole. You are nourished, secure, and blissfully serene thanks to the freely distributed drug called soma. And while sex is strongly encouraged, the old way of procreation is forbidden, eliminating even the pains of childbirth. But when a man and woman journey beyond these confines to where the “savages” reside, and bring back two outsiders, the cracks begin to show. Named as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, Brave New World is one of the first truly dystopian novels. Influenced by the historic events of Huxley’s era yet as relevant today as ever, it is a remarkable depiction of the conflict between progress and the human spirit. “Chilling. . . . That he gave us the dark side of genetic engineering in 1932 is amazing.” —Providence Journal-Bulletin “It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Grey Eminence written by Aldous Huxley and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-10-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping biography by the author of Brave New World The life of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's aide, was a shocking paradox. After spending his days directing operations on the battlefield, Father Joseph would pass the night in prayer, or in composing spiritual guidance for the nuns in his care. He was an aspirant to sainthood and a practising mystic, yet his ruthless exercise of power succeeded in prolonging the unspeakable horrors of the Thirty Years' War. In his masterful biography, Huxley explores how an intensely religious man could lead such a life and how he reconciled the seemingly opposing moral systems of religion and politics.
Download or read book Island written by Aldous Huxley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Download or read book Those Barren Leaves written by Aldous Huxley and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation? Mrs. Aldwinkle, an English aristocrat of a certain age, has purchased a mansion in the Italian countryside. She wishes to bring a salon of intellectual luminaries into her orbit, and to that end she invites a strange cast of characters to spend time with her in her palazzo: Irene, her young niece; Ms. Thriplow, a governess-turned-novelist; Mr. Calamy, a handsome young man of great privilege and even greater ennui; Mr. Cardan, a worldly gentleman whose main talent seems to be the enjoyment of life; Hovenden, a young motorcar-obsessed lord with a speech impediment; and Mr. Falx, a socialist leader. To this unlikely cast is soon added Mr. Chelifer, an author with an especially florid, overwrought style that is wasted on his day job as editor of The Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette, and the Elvers, a scheming brother who is the guardian of his mentally-challenged sister. As this unlikely group mingles, they discuss a great many grand topics: love, art, language, life, culture. Yet very early on the reader comes to realize that behind the pompousness of their elaborate discussions lies nothing but vacuity—these characters are a satire of the self-important intellectuals of Huxley’s era. His skewering of their intellectual barrenness continues as the group moves on to a trip around the surrounding country, in a satire of the Grand Tour tradition. The party brings their English snobbery out in full force as they traipse around Rome, sure of nothing else except in their belief that Italy is culturally superior simply because it’s Italy. As the vacation winds down, we’re left with a biting lampoon of the elites who suppose themselves to be at the height of art and culture—the kinds of personalities that arise in every generation, sure of their own greatness but unable to actually contribute anything to the world of art and culture that they feel is so important.
Download or read book Aldous Huxley written by Sybille Bedford and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Huxley and God written by Aldous Huxley and published by Herder & Herder. This book was released on 2003 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays, written with the authors trademark elegance and wit, tackles subjects such as Action and Contemplation, Religion and Time, Reflections on the Lord's Prayer, and Notes on Zen.
Download or read book Living with Monsters written by Indrani Deb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aldous Huxley is one of the most well-known modernist intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, excelling in novels, essays, philosophical tracts, and poems. His novels are special in that they use a unique form – the novel of ideas – with which to satirize human nature and the pride regarding human achievement. Few readers of English literature are not acquainted with books like Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza, and Brave New World (novels dealt with in detail). A proper study of Huxley’s characterization in his novels opens up a veritable treasure-house of history, philosophy, psychology, and incisive satire. "Characterology", as the art of projecting different kinds of characters is called, is an ancient art, which either aimed at representing the entire universe in a single individual, or the same in a variegated form through various individuals. Huxley uses the latter kind in his representation of character, and as such, a study of the characters of his novels opens up a general interpretation of the universe as a whole.
Download or read book Eyeless in Gaza written by Aldous Huxley and published by Carroll & Graf Pub. This book was released on 1995 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aldous Huxley- a major figure of the literary and intellectual history of this century- dramatizes here one man's disillusionment threatening to plunge the world into a new morass.
Download or read book Aldous Huxley and the Search for Meaning written by Ronald T. Sion and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aldous Huxley, author of eleven novels, remains one of the towering figures of the twentieth century, his work resistant to passing fads in literature. This critical biography explores Huxley's lifelong quest for self-actualization by intertwining the events of his life and details of the creative period that produced each book. Considering Huxley's letters, essays and interviews in its examination of the thematic content of each novel, the text finds a man striving for the intellectual growth that would yield a sound philosophical and spiritual view of life, one he infused into his work.
Download or read book Hemingway s Boat written by Paul Hendrickson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood. Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar. We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend. We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.” Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.
Download or read book The Perennial Philosophy written by Aldous Huxley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions." With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.
Download or read book Aldous Huxley written by Milton Birnbaum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the moral vacuum and world of shifting values following World War I, Aldous Huxley was both a sensitive refl ector and an articulate catalyst. This work provides a highly illuminating analysis of Huxley's evolution from skeptic to mystic. As Milton Birnbaum shows, in a perceptive interpretation of Huxley's poetry, fi ction, essays and biographies-what evolved in Huxley's moral and intellectual pilgrimage was not so much a change in direction as a shift in emphasis. Even in the sardonic Huxley of the 1920s and 1930s, there is a moral concern. In the later Huxley, there are traces of the satirical skepticism which delighted his readers in the decades preceding World War II. A man of letters, a keen observer, seeker of new ways while profoundly knowledgeable in the truths of ancient wisdom, Huxley tried to achieve a symbiotic synthesis of the best of all worlds. In clarifying and interpreting Huxley's intellectual, moral, and philosophical development, Birnbaum touches upon all the subjects that came under the scrutiny of a singularly encyclopedic mind. This book is of great worth to those interested both in Huxley the brilliant satirist and in Huxley the seeker of salvation. In his search, Huxley typifi ed the modern quest for values. Milton Birnbaum's study is an invaluable guide in that journey. His new introduction takes account of research and analysis of Huxley that has occurred since this book's original publication.
Download or read book Aldous Huxley s Hands written by Allene Symons and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author?This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little- known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle. This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.
