Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 at Godalming, in Surrey, into a famous intellectual family: his grandfather was the biologist T. H. Huxley. An eye disease in his youth left him nearly blind for a time. He studied English at Oxford, and in the 1920s and 1930s became known for satirical novels, above all Brave New World (1932).

In 1937 he moved to the United States, and settled in California, where, with his friend Gerald Heard, he came into contact with the Vedanta Society of Southern California and its teacher Swami Prabhavananda. His interest turned to mysticism. The Perennial Philosophy (1945), an anthology of passages from the mystics of many traditions with his own commentary, argued that a common wisdom underlies the religions, and became the classic statement of the perennialist view.

In The Doors of Perception (1954) he described his experience with mescaline, and suggested that the brain acts as a filter on a wider consciousness, a book that influenced the counterculture of the 1960s. His last novel, Island (1962), imagined a society built on spiritual practice. He died in Los Angeles in 1963.