Dana Sawyer

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.

Aldous Huxley, a Biography

Aldous Huxley was born in Britain in 1894 into a world of privilege and class. The grandson of evolutionist T. H. Huxley and the great-nephew of poet Matthew Arnold, Huxley bore a great sense of moral obligation. In this accessible new biography, Sawyer explores Huxley's life and the impact it had on his writings, including his classic, Brave New World, which celebrated its 70th anniversary recently.

A Biography

Aldous Huxley

Uwe Rasch

Julian Piras

Throughout his writing career, and especially in the last thirty years of his life, Aldous Huxley exhibited a deep interest in human potentialities, which he often described as our greatest unused natural resource. The present volume is the first book to focus on this Huxleyan core concern. It is based on presentations given at the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in 2017 at the University of Almería (Spain). This volume collects essays by eleven scholars from eight countries that discuss Huxley's concept of human potentialities from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is another innovative feature of this book, since today Huxley is mainly remembered as a novelist, although only eleven of his fifty published works belong to that genre. The topics of this volume span Huxley's mature philosophy, including his theories relating to the expansion of consciousness, the development of nonverbal humanities, the need to improve bio-ethics, the role of nature, the role of beliefs and prejudice, and other subjects. These essays review Huxley's various positions, shedding light on their possible significance for today. Huxley marshalled his remarkable intellect to the project of improving the human condition, and here we find an up-to-date report card of his theories and their efficacy.

Dana Sawyer

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