Aldous Huxley.

The third of four children, Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England, into a family of prominent intellectuals. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was a biologist known as Darwin’s Bulldog, and his brother Julian Huxley became a renowned evolutionary biologist. His mother Julia Arnold was related to poet Matthew Arnold. At age 16, Huxley contracted keratitis that left him nearly blind for two years, disqualifying him from service in World War I. After recovering, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a First in English Literature, one of only two students to achieve that honor that year.

Huxley’s literary career began in 1915 when he joined the circle of Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor, meeting writers including D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. He published early novels such as Crome Yellow 1921, Antic Hay 1923, Those Barren Leaves 1925, and Point Counter Point 1928, which brought him international fame. His most famous work, Brave New World 1932, was a negative utopia parodying H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods and influenced by Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood, California, with his wife and friend Gerald Heard, where he befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti and became a follower of Vedanta. He wrote screenplays for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland 1951, Pride and Prejudice 1940, and Jane Eyre 1944.

Huxley experimented with mescaline under research by Dr. Humphry Osmond starting in 1953, documenting his experiences in The Doors of Perception 1954 and Heaven and Hell 1956. His final novel, Island 1962, revisited his ideas on utopia and influenced 1960s psychedelic culture and the New Age movement.

Huxley fell in love with Belgian refugee Maria Nys, whom he married on July 10, 1919. They had one son, Matthew Huxley 1920–2005. Maria died of breast cancer in 1955. A year later, Huxley married Laura Archera Huxley, a writer who later became his biographer. After moving to Hollywood in 1937, Huxley adopted a vegetarian diet, practiced yoga, and meditated under the guidance of Swami Prabhavananda. He turned down a knighthood in 1959 and was denied U.S. citizenship for refusing to bear arms. On his deathbed, he requested an intramuscular injection of 100 mg of LSD, which his wife administered; he died peacefully a few hours later on November 22, 1963.

Brave New World remains a staple of dystopian literature and has been adapted for television multiple times 1980, 1998. His psychedelic writings inspired the 1960s counterculture; the rock band The Doors took their name from his book The Doors of Perception. He appears on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 1967. His ideas on genetic engineering, euthanasia, and social control have influenced science fiction and philosophy.