English novelist and essayist — grandson of Darwin's defender T.H. Huxley, brother of the biologist Julian, a central figure of English letters from the 1920s onward and the author of the dystopia which, paired with Orwell's 1984, defines the two directions 20th-century political fiction imagined that modern unfreedom would take. Where 1984 is about the state that crushes you by force, Brave New World (1932) is about the state that crushes you by making you want what it gives you. The Huxley-Orwell pair — the boot on the face and the pleasure that hollows out resistance — is one of the durable arguments of political thought about the character of modern power, and most subsequent serious thinking about surveillance capitalism, attention, and manufactured consent works within it in one way or another.
Huxley's earlier work — Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Point Counter Point (1928) — is satirical high-bourgeois fiction in the manner of the Bloomsbury-adjacent 1920s. Brave New World is the inflection point. Its World State, with its engineered caste system, its promiscuity as social control, its soma as universal mood stabilizer, and its abolition of solitude and of art, was prescient about techniques of control that the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s never perfected but that consumer capitalism, pharmacology, and social media now approach. Brave New World Revisited (1958), his late essay-length return to the book, concluded that his original dystopia had arrived faster than he had feared.
Huxley's second intellectual life, after his move to Los Angeles in 1937, was as an explorer of Vedantic and mystical traditions. The Perennial Philosophy (1945) argued that the great religions converge on a common mystical core; The Doors of Perception (1954) reported on his mescaline experiments in the language of Blake and negative theology, and became — for better or worse — the founding document of the 1960s psychedelic movement. His last novel, Island (1962), reversed the Brave New World move: the same technical resources, arranged differently, could build a society oriented toward awareness rather than distraction. He died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the same day as C.S. Lewis and as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.