10 Things You Might Not Know About Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26th July 1894 – 22nd November 1963) was an English writer, novelist and philosopher best known for works such as Brave New World, and The Doors of Perception.

Born in Godalming in Surrey, Huxley attended Eton college before growing up to write, experiment with psychadelic drugs, and become known as one of the pre-eminent intellectual minds of his day.

Today we’re taking a look at the author’s unusual life, with some facts that you may not know.

Nobel Laureate, or not

Aldous Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy no fewer than seven times, but never won.

A challenging early life

As a young teenager, Huxley’s mother died of cancer, then his brother died by suicide.

Wrote his first novel blind

Huxley spent almost his entire teenage years blind due to an infection in the cornea called keratisis. He wrote his first novel by the touch system and couldn’t even read it back. Although his eyesight improved, it was always poor with academics still debating to this day just how poor it was.

Orwell’s French teacher

In 1917 Huxley worked briefly as a French teacher at Eton where he taught French to Eric Blair, who would go on to write under the pen name George Orwell. In a second connection between the two, Orwell would go on to accuse Huxley of plagiarism, accusing him of plagiarising Brave New World from the 1923 dystopian novel ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

He was too much of a pacifist to be American

Although born in Surrey, Huxley died in the US but he never became a citizen. This is because Aldous Huxley was a pacifist and because he stated that he would refuse to fight if there was a war, he knew he would be turned down and so withdrew his application.

Jim Morrison was a fan

So much so in fact that The Doors is named after Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. In an inception type situation we learn that Huxley took the phrase from English poet William Blake.

He believed global overpopulation would become a problem.

In an interview in 1958, Huxley stated that he believed that overpopulation would be our downfall as fewer food resources and more people would lead to social unrest.

His grandfather was nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog

Huxley’s paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a biologist who was such an advocate for the theory of evolution he was nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog.

A most original death

Huxley was dying of laryngeal cancer when he made a written request to his wife for LSD, two doses later, Huxley was dead.

But his death was overshadowed

Huxley died on 22nd November 1963, the day J. F Kennedy was shot. C. S Lewis died on the same day but both authors’ deaths were overshadowed by the assassination. We talked about this in a previous blog here.