Aldous Huxley's «Brav New World»

Aldous Huxley's «Brav New World»

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  • Date Submitted: 01/27/2009 8:23 AM
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Biography

Family tree
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and professional herbalist Leonard Huxley and first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School and also the niece of Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He was grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent English naturalists of the 19th century, a man known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His brother Julian Huxley was also a noted biologist.
Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when he was fourteen. Three years later he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".[2] Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 1916 with First Class Honours.
Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name George Orwell) was among his pupils, but was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. [3] For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence' was one source for...

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