When and where was Aldous Huxley born?
Aldous Huxley was born on the 26th of July 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third son of Leonard Huxley, a writer and schoolmaster, and Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School.
Questions about Aldous Huxley
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is Aldous Huxley's most famous novel?
Brave New World, published in 1932, is Huxley's most famous novel and his first dystopian work. Set in a future London, it portrays a society organised around mass production and Pavlovian conditioning, and was partly inspired by Huxley's experience at a chemical plant in Billingham, County Durham.
How did Aldous Huxley die?
Huxley died on the 22nd of November 1963 at his home in Los Angeles, aged 69, from oral cancer. Unable to speak, he wrote a note to his wife Laura requesting "LSD, 100 μg, intramuscular." She administered the dose at 11:20 am and a second dose an hour later; he died at 5:20 pm PST. His death was largely overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the same day.
Was Aldous Huxley nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Aldous Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. In 1962, he was also elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, the senior literary organisation in Britain.
What was Aldous Huxley's connection to George Orwell?
Huxley taught Eric Blair - who later wrote under the name George Orwell - when Huxley was a French teacher at Eton College. On the 21st of October 1949, Huxley wrote to Orwell congratulating him on Nineteen Eighty-Four and predicting that future governments would control populations through conditioning and suggestion rather than force.
What was Aldous Huxley's experience with mescaline and The Doors of Perception?
In early 1953, Huxley arranged with British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond to supply and supervise a mescaline session in southern California. Huxley described the experience in The Doors of Perception, published in 1954. He later had a second mescaline experience he considered more profound than those in the book, and went on to advise Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert on psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s.