Collected Essays

All over the English-speaking world critics have greeted these essays with such comments as “brilliant… provocative… magnificent.” Many find that Huxley is the finest essayist since Montaigne. It has been said that “Mr. Huxley is not only a literary giant, but one of the greatest thinkers of our time.” Mr. HuxleyвЂTMs topic is man, the total compass of his faculties in science, literature, music, religion, art, love, sex, speculative thinking and simple being. Here, displayed to the full, is the astonishing virtuosity of HuxleyвЂTMs genius. The range of Aldous HuxleyвЂTMs thinking was astonishing. His opinions on art were as original and well-founded as his discussions of biology or architecture, poetry, music, or history. As a virtuoso of letters, he was unequalled. Born into a famous family with a long intellectual tradition, Huxley attended Eton and Oxford. His reputation as a writer was well-established before he was thirty. Mr. Huxley was not only a master essayist; in 1959 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for “having done the best work of our time in what threatens to be a neglected field, the novel of ideas.” His novels include “Crome Yellow” and “The Genius and the Goddess”. The essays range from nuanced assessments of art and architecture to political analyses, history, science, religion, and art, and a newly discovered series on music. Wide-ranging, allusive, and witty, they are informed by the probing skepticism of a highly educated and ironically incisive member of the English upper middle class. Huxley's fascination with the codes and conventions of European culture, his growing apprehensions about the menacing collapse of the European political order, and his awareness of the impact of science and technology on the post-Versailles world of England, France, Germany, and the United States form the basis for his critique. His subjects overlap with the satirical novels he wrote during the period between the wars, culminating in Point Counter Point and Brave New World. At their best, these essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature.