AfterManyaSummerDiestheSwan

AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN Aldous Huxley was born in 1894, the third son of Leonard Huxley and grandson of T. H. Huxley. From a preparatory school (described in Eyeless in Gaza) he went on to Eton, which he left at seventeen owing to serious eye trouble which left him nearly blind. One eye recovered sufficiently for him to enter Oxford in 1913, but he had to abandon his hope of becoming a physician and was rejected for military service in 1914. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian, and joined the Athenaeum magazine, writing biographical and architectural articles and reviews of fiction, drama, music, and art Having already published three books of verse, he began with Limbo and Crome Yellow the series of stories and novels which combined dazzling intellectual dialogue and a surface cynicism with a ground of clear moral convictions, and exerted a stroņg emancipating influence. In the twenties Huxley lived mostly in Italy; in the thirties his home was near Toulon, France. To this period belonged Brave New World, a pessimistic futurist novel and his best known. In 1937 the state of his eyes led him to move to California, where ......