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Aldous Huxley Complete Essays #6
Complete Essays, Vol. VI: 1956-1963
This sixth and concluding volume of Huxley's essays brings to completion what critics have applauded as “a remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited” (Jeffrey Hart). Here the reader will find Huxley's final assessment of modern society. Revisiting the issues that informed his utopian nightmare, Brave New World, he addresses a broad range of contemporary topics, from ecology, sociobiology, and psychology to politics, history, and religion. His concern with the problems of modernity is everywhere evident. This volume includes his final meditation on art and religion (“Shakespeare and Religion”) as well as two recently discovered essays on science, technology, and “modern life.” Volume VI also marks Huxley's intervention in the C. P. Snow / F. R. Leavis controversy of the “two cultures.” The relationship between science and humanistic culture was a vigorously contended issue in the early 1960s, drawing writers like Lionel Trilling and scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer into the debate. Huxley's response was Literature and Science, his last book and a summation of his theory of art and culture. As one of the last of the modernist public intellectuals, his essays comprise a refiguration of modern cultural history in all its manifestations.
- GenresEssays
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
99 people want to read
About the author
Aldous Huxley
953 books13.7k followersAldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 30, 2018
I started reading Huxley's Collected Essays two years ago and I've finally finished the last volume. Now I'm sad. Who is our present-day Huxley? Such vision. Such a great mind.
June 23, 2020
This is the final book of Huxley's essays, covering the last part of his life. It includes material that is otherwise found in his book Brave New World Revisited. As is the case in all these volumes, the topics addressed are all over the place, from world politics to literature to music to architecture, and any other permutation of the topics you might find in a literary salon of the period.
I've read these half dozen volumes over the course of something like 12 years, so my memory is by no means perfect. I will say that they look nice sitting on the shelf together, but in terms of the actual value of enterprise, I'm not sure how sold I really am. Huxley is a clever writer, and the essays, while you are reading them, are often entertaining. But do these really stand the test of time, and deserve to be read en mass, more than 50 years after Huxley's death? For most of us, the answer is no, unless you develop the weird kind of fascination with Huxley that I have.
Huxley is very much in his gullible, experimental period here, and many of the essays profess an undue openness to concepts like ESP, and a belief that serious scholarship will soon find the phenomenon undeniable. History has not exactly been on his side, here.
I will say this though: this book does have a great essay that has Huxley imagining his personal library burning down, and then having to choose which books to re-purchase. It sure struck a chord with me, and is Huxley at his most entertaining, while also offering penetrating insight into some of his literary tastes, and casting shade on some of his contemporaries.
Throughout the series, I'd have liked more input from the editors, as well. In this volume, we do get an introductory essay, but all the rest of the material is allowed to stand on its own, with no commentary on any of the pieces about Huxley's progression of thought or the importance of any particular piece.
I'm not exactly sure who the audience for this review is, since if you are seeking out these books, you surely know exactly what you're getting. But I am compelled to add my two cents, and now I have.
I've read these half dozen volumes over the course of something like 12 years, so my memory is by no means perfect. I will say that they look nice sitting on the shelf together, but in terms of the actual value of enterprise, I'm not sure how sold I really am. Huxley is a clever writer, and the essays, while you are reading them, are often entertaining. But do these really stand the test of time, and deserve to be read en mass, more than 50 years after Huxley's death? For most of us, the answer is no, unless you develop the weird kind of fascination with Huxley that I have.
Huxley is very much in his gullible, experimental period here, and many of the essays profess an undue openness to concepts like ESP, and a belief that serious scholarship will soon find the phenomenon undeniable. History has not exactly been on his side, here.
I will say this though: this book does have a great essay that has Huxley imagining his personal library burning down, and then having to choose which books to re-purchase. It sure struck a chord with me, and is Huxley at his most entertaining, while also offering penetrating insight into some of his literary tastes, and casting shade on some of his contemporaries.
Throughout the series, I'd have liked more input from the editors, as well. In this volume, we do get an introductory essay, but all the rest of the material is allowed to stand on its own, with no commentary on any of the pieces about Huxley's progression of thought or the importance of any particular piece.
I'm not exactly sure who the audience for this review is, since if you are seeking out these books, you surely know exactly what you're getting. But I am compelled to add my two cents, and now I have.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews