A Brave New History: Author Biography

Brave New World is a novel written by Aldous Huxley in the year 1932. Aldous Huxley was a British writer. He was born July 26th, 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, England. Aldous Huxley was the third son of writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Aldous' family was heavily involved in the sciences. His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley was a zoologist; his brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley both became biologists. Huxley also had a brother named Noel Trevelyan Huxley, who committed suicide after a period of depression.

Huxley began education in his father's botanical laboratory, then went to Hillside School, Malvern. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was only 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness which left him partially blind for two-three years.Aldous volunteered to join the army at the outbreak of WWI, but was rejected due to his partial blindness. Once his eyesight recovered, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1916 he edited Oxford Poetry and later graduated (B.A.) with first class honours.

 

Aldous Huxley was heavily concerned about the important changes occurring at the time in Western civilization. Huxley was prompted to write novels in the 1930s about the serious threats posed by the combination of power and technical progress, as well as about what he identified as a drift in behaviourism.
 

One of his most known novels is Brave New World. During this time, Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was not yet in power of Germany and that the Stalinist purges had not begun. Because of this, Huxley had not yet explored the full details and extremities of government control. In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, he imagined a society that used genetics and cloning in order to condition and control individuals. In this future society, all children are conceived in test tubes. They are genetically conditioned to belong to one of the five categories of populations, from the most intelligent to the least intelligent.