Best Selling Books by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel. Borrowing from The Tempest , Huxley imagines a genetically-engineered future where life is pain-free but meaningless. The book heavily influenced George Orwell’s 1984 and science-fiction in general. The novel examines a futuristic society, called the World State, that revolves around science and efficiency. In this society, emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children at a young age, and there are no lasting relationships because “every one belongs to every one else” (a common World State dictum). Huxley begins the novel by thoroughly explaining the scientific and compartmentalized nature of this society, beginning at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where children are created outside the womb and cloned in order to increase the population. The reader is then introduced to the class system of this world, where citizens are sorted as embryos to be of a certain class. The embryos, which exist within tubes and incubators, are provided with differing amounts of chemicals and hormones in order to condition them into predetermined classes. Embryos destined for the higher classes get chemicals to perfect them both physically and mentally, whereas those of the lower classes are altered to be imperfect in those respects. These classes, in order from highest to lowest, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred to be leaders, and the Epsilons are bred to be menial labourers.

While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. The final novel written by Aldous Huxley, Island was penned as a counterpart to his most famous work Brave New World, which depicted a dystopian society transformed by the momentum of technological and industrial development. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

One of Huxley''s masterpieces-one of the Modern Library''s "100 Best Works of the Century."

When Brave New World was first published in 1932 it was regarded as another screwball Science Fiction novel. However, as time as gone on, more and more of the events predicted by this novel have become true and it is now required reading at major universities. In the Brave New World, the classes of people are divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Each class is trained to believe that they are better off than either the people below them or above them. The people at the bottom of the scale are the laborers who do the actual work. To maintain this intelligence disparity, children of lower classes are made less smart through oxygen treatments and chemicals. Parenting and family is nonexistent and such concepts are considered archaic and disdained. All children are born as test tube babies. One fertilized egg will normally produce 96 identical twin children. However, experiments have been done in which as many as 16,000 identical children have been produced. Sex is no longer needed or wanted to produce children. As a result, a man can usually have sexual intercourse with any woman he wants. Just as almost everybody will shake your hand if you stick your hand out, in the Brave New World, almost every woman will have sexual intercourse with you if you ask her.

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity-these are the elements of Aldous Huxley''s caustic and entertaining satire on man''s desire to live indefinitely. With his customary wit and intellectual sophistication, Huxley pursues his characters in their quest for the eternal, finishing on a note of horror. "This is Mr. Huxley''s Hollywood novel, and you might expect it to be fantastic, extravagant, crazy and preposterous. It is all that, and heaven and hell too....It is the kind of novel that he is particularly the master of, where the most extraordinary and fortuitous events are followed by contemplative little essays on the meaning of life....The story is outrageously good."—New York Times. "A highly sensational plot that will keep astonishing you to practically the final sentence."—The New Yorker. "Mr. Huxley''s elegant mockery, his cruel aptness of phrase, the revelations and the ingenious surprises he springs on the reader are those of a master craftsman; Mr. Huxley is at the top of his form." —London Times Literary Supplement.

"This is Mr. Huxley''s best novel for a very long time . . . admirably constructed . . . bright and sun-pierced." New Statesman and Nation

Originally published in 1932, Huxley''s terrifying vision of a controlled and emotionless future Utopian society is truly startling in its prediction of modern scientific and cultural phenomena, including test-tube babies and rampant drug abuse.

The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley''s vision of the future -- of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Huxley''s most enduring masterpiece. Following Brave New World is the nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958. It is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with the prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

"In this savage novel Huxley transports us to Los Angeles in the year 2108, where we learn to our dismay about the 22nd-century way of life."

Crome Yellow Aldous Huxley - Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley''s first novel, satirizing the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parody version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write. On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabited by several of Huxley''s most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive "History of Crome." Denis''s stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald''s words, "is too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony

Some of the characters are thinly disguised portraits. Perhaps the most famous of Huxley''s early novels.

The author describes his experiences traveling through the Caribbean to Guatemala and southern Mexico in 1933.

An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions." With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write.The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley''s later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature''s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."

Aldous Huxley’s unforgettable tale of a brilliant physicist, his beautiful wife, and the young man who tears their world apart. Thirty years ago, ecstasy and torment took hold of John Rivers, shocking him out of “half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form.” He had an affair with the wife of his mentor, Henry Maartens—a pathbreaking physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and a figure of blinding brilliance—bringing the couple to ruin. Now, on Christmas Eve while a small grandson sleeps upstairs, John Rivers is moved to set the record straight about the great man and the radiant, elemental creature he married, who viewed the renowned genius through undazzled eyes.

Two classic texts in one volume reveal Huxley''s explorations into the mind''s remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness.

Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley. It was published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story of a house party at "Crome" (a lightly veiled reference to Garsington Manor, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write). We hear the history of the house from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. Our hero, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.