Mortal Coils Aldous Huxley - Mortal Coils is a collection of five short fictional pieces written by Aldous Huxley in 1921. As a Hollywood screenwriter Huxley used much of his earnings to bring Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. He worked for many of the major studios including MGM and Disney. In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S....

Limbo (1920) is a collection of short fiction by English author Aldous Huxley. Mostly satirical, Huxley's novella, play, and four short stories show a promising writer at the very beginning of his career. In the novella "The Farcical History of Richard Greenow," Huxley satirizes the lives of his friends and acquaintances at Eton and Oxford. Richard Greenow, a young writer, spends his days as a politically engaged academic. At night, however, he writes...

The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it details his taking mescaline in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

Aldous Huxley is back in the old smooth, mythological world, consecrated by a thousand poets. He pays occasional tribute to ugly fact in the course of this poem, but he is at home while describing Leda with her maids bathing in Eurotas, her shining body, and the clear deep pools! The modern terror of the too-perfect world makes him dwell longer, and more humorously, than his predecessors would have done, upon Jove tossing on his Olympian couch, tortured...

SOME people I know can look back over the long series of their childish holidays and see in their memory always a different landscape, chalk downs or Swiss mountains; a blue and sunny sea or the grey, ever-troubled fringe of the ocean; heathery moors under the cloud with far away a patch of sunlight on the hills, golden as happiness and, like happiness, remote, precarious, impermanent, or the untroubled waters of Como, the cypresses and the Easter...

In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect...

The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words. The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third poetry collection. "The Defeat of Youth" is a moving sonnet sequence on the passage of innocence to experience, on familiar transformation of love into lust....

Huxley's bleak future prophesized in Brave New World was a capitalist civilization which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years ahead, in "this year of stability, A.F. 632"—the A.F. standing for After Ford, meaning the godlike Henry Ford.

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Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. Aldous Huxley

Excerpt: "From Bocca di Magra to Bocca d'Arno, mile after mile, the sandy beaches smoothly, unbrokenly extend. Inland from the beach, behind a sheltering belt of pines, lies a strip of coastal plain-flat as a slice of Holland and dyked with slow streams. Corn grows here and the vine, with plantations of slim poplars interspersed, and fat water-meadows. Here and there the streams brim over into shallow lakes, whose shores are fringed with sodden fields...