Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English novelist, essayist, critic and poet. Born in Godalming, Surrey in 1894, Huxley was educated at Eton college and the University of Oxford. He worked on the staff of a few periodicals and then published four books of poetry before the release of his first novel, "Crome Yellow" in 1921.

He was best known for novels like "Brave New World" and non-fiction works such as "The Doors of Perception" a book that he wrote about his experiences with psychedelic drugs.

Huxley lived mostly in Italy and France in the 1920's and in 1937 immigrated to America. He published over 45 books in his lifetime and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature seven different times. Huxley considered himself a humanist and wrote many works on pacifism including, "Ends and Means", "An Encyclopedia of Pacifism", and "Pacifism and Philosophy".

Huxley suffered from very poor eyesight for most of his life and it is widely believed that he was mostly blind as the result of an eye disease when he was a teenager.

In 1919, Huxley married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he met in Oxford. Together the couple had one son, Matthew who went on to become a epidemiologist. After Maria's death in 1955 Huxley remarried fellow author Laura Archera. Laura wrote the leading biography on Huxley entitled: "This Timeless Moment".

Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960 and died three years later at the age of 69. Unfortunately his passing was largely overshadowed by the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on the same day. Huxley's ashes are interred in Surrey, England in his family crypt.