HUXLEY, Aldous

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

(Brave New World)

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Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into an astonishingly erudite and academic family who had an important influence on English intellectual life.  From Eton he went on to Balliol College, Oxford where, in 1916, he edited Oxford Poetry.

Huxley's first major novel, Crome Yellow, a thinly veiled satire on Garsington Manor, the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where Huxley had lived and worked as a farm labourer during World War I, and where he met his first wife, was published in 1921.  It is generally considered, with the obvious exception of Brave New World, his most important work.  Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the novel was “the highest point so far attained by Anglo-Saxon sophistication”.   His following three novels continued to satirise social behaviour in post-war Britain using friends and family as fodder for his characterisations.  In 1932 he published Brave New World, the cornerstone of dystopian fiction.  All his fears of totalitarian states and un-fettered scientific progress were combined to create  “...[a] brilliantly plausible fantasy …  constructed from his scientific gleanings.  It is a Utopia which is never dull, of which the horror is always credible...” (Connolly)   

Huxley wrote prolifically over a 50 year period and, in addition to his many novels, his oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts.  We regularly stock first editions of these publications.

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