Aldous Huxley - Famous English Writer

The best representative of the more intellectual approach in the English novel is Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963). A. Huxley was grandson of the great natural historian, Thomas Huxley, he brought analytical scientific methods into fiction. In Antic Hay (1923) he depicts, in a humorous way, irresponsible people who try to have fun. In his masterpiece Point Counter Point (1928) he presents a picture of the crisis in bourgeois society. He excelled in recording the uncertainly and aimlessness of intellectuals after World War I. Influenced by Lawrence, wanted to achieve a harmonious balance between emotion and intellect, flash and reason, and in this novel he contrasts two different characters, Philip Quarles, an intellectual struggling hopelessly and tragically to acquire simple human happiness, and a well-balanced uncomplicated principles Mark Rampion, who lives a full and happy life.

The plots in Huxley's novels only form the background and are not all-important. Growing up amidst purely intellectual family, Huxley understood that an exclusive concentration on intellectual activity tends to hinder genuine human happiness. In his Utopian fantastic novels Brave New World (1932) a Brave New World Revisited (1958), he creates a dreadful vision of a future world where children are produced by chemical ingredients. He criticised and satirises beliefs in a mechanical world. His last science-fiction novel Ape and Essence (1948), is protest against atomic war, a vision of twenty-second century when people return to primitive life after the world was destroyed by atomic bombs.