Aldous Huxley

Keratitis punctata cost Aldous Huxley most of his sight for two or three years from 1911 and ended any thought of medicine, so he read English at Oxford instead and turned to satire. Born in Godalming, Surrey, in 1894, grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and brother of Julian, he made his name with sharp comedies of country-house England and the London literary set: Crome Yellow in 1921, Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925, and the wider, harder Point Counter Point in 1928. Brave New World followed in 1932, imagining a stable world state built on engineered contentment. He moved to California in 1937 and wrote for the studios, including the 1940 Pride and Prejudice. The Doors of Perception, 1954, records a single afternoon on mescaline and is usually bound with its sequel Heaven and Hell. Island, his last novel, published in 1962, sets a workable good society on Pala, an island Huxley placed in the Indian Ocean. He died on 22 November 1963, aged 69, the day President Kennedy was killed.