Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

910 Words2 Pages

Aldous Huxley was a British writer. He was born on July 26, 1894, and died on November 22, 1963. He was most known for his fifth novel, Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Huxley was born in Godalming in the Surrey County in southern England. Huxley was the son of an English schoolteacher, Julia Arnold, and a writer, Leonard.
Huxley intended to become a doctor. But having contracted keratitis, which is an eye disease resulting in near blindness, he was forced to change his profession. He learned to read Braille; after two years he had improved appropriately so he could read with a magnifying glass (). He then attended Balliol College, Oxford, studied English literature and philology, and earned his degree in 1915. Aldous Huxley wrote 47 books, but one of his most well-known novels, and some critics argue his most important, would be Brave New World. Huxley wrote it in only four months.
Aldous Huxley won many awards; he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction from the University of Edinburgh in 1939, for his novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In 1959, he received the Award of Merit and Gold Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and he also accepted an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of California. He died on November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The year before his death, he received the Companion of Literature from the British Royal Society of Literature ( ).
Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, involves a futuristic perception of the world and shows how technology has taken over the world, and human beings are now managed by science. In the novel, Brave New World, society is intensely interest...

... middle of paper ...

...ct world. In Greek terms utopia meaning “no place” which is ironic in Huxley's novel (“utopia”). It is not a "good place," and so it is not, in the Greek terms, a utopia. Huxley himself called his world a "negative utopia," the opposite of the traditional utopia. Readers have also used the word "dystopia," meaning "bad place," to describe Huxley's fictional world and others like it.
In conclusion, Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's warning to us. It is his attempt to make man realize that since knowledge is control, whoever controls and uses knowledge has the power. Science and technology shouldn’t be masters, but be the servants of man. The novel states that human beings should not adapt and be imprisoned to the government, science and technology. Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, is an alternative portrayal of how our lives could be in the faraway future.

Open Document