Aldous Huxley

Like many of his contemporaries, English novelist Aldous Huxley sought the gold to be mined in the Hollywood studios; however, only four of his film scripts made it to the screen. A richer mine came from his association with people such as Hearst, Thomas Mann, Chaplin, and Garbo; the "Hollywood" novels After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Ape and Essence were the result. Dunaway alternates discussions of Huxley's life and beliefs with large doses of tittle-tattle; he seems especially fascinated with Hollywood's lesbian underground. Few new insights are offered here. Huxley's film work is amply covered in Virginia Clark's Aldous Huxley and Film (Scarecrow, 1987), and his life is the subject of several biographies.

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While Island is a work of fiction, it is the vehicle Huxley used to communicate his ideas about how people in a good society would interact with each other and their environment. These web pages are not offering a literary critique of the novel, analyzing any symbolism, or even summarizing the novel. The plot is a wonderful story in its own right, and it's best to read the book, not a synopsis, to fully enjoy it. The goal here is to simply present Huxley's underlying ideas and philosophies upon which the novel is built.

Just as many science-oriented movies start off with a child being taught something, or a news program, or some other educational device which is really for the benefit of the viewer, Huxley has his own "news reel" in Island so that the setting and events in the story are understood in context. The people of Pala (which is the island the title refers to) live their lives based on ideas representing the best that Eastern and Western philosophies have to offer. Neither philosophy is quite enough on its own, or maybe is too much, to live a full, balanced life. And it so happens that Pala's philosophies result from the hard work and combined ideas of two founding fathers, one a Buddhist and one an analytical medical doctor (from Thoughts on Aldous Huxley by Mike Markowski).

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The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future -- of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.

Following Brave New World is the nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958. It is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with the prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

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Read about the Huxley Symposium on my blog Vision Thing!