Aldous Huxley And The Brave New World

Within any novel, there are always elements taken directly from the author's life and experiences. Their thoughts and opinions will also be imparted to the novel, delivering a direct message to the reader and perhaps arguing their opinions, to persuade the audience. These influences on and from his environment are apparent in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In the 1930's, the time the book was written, many world-scale events were taking place, and society was changing as a whole. All of this no doubt affected Huxley, and resulted in one the most powerful, thought provoking novels. His vision of the future gives great insight to an undesirable lifestyle which may not be so different from today's existing one. The aspect that makes Huxley's novel so classic is his visionary ability to use these current influences and invent such a fascinating society, and at the time revolutionary new world. This has resulted in a novel that not only affected people of its time, but has also had profound effects on latter day societies.

Huxley's family all consisted of upper class intellectuals, His father was a biographer, editor, and poet, and his grandfather was a famous biologist. Living around these people, he not only received a superior education in a wide variety of subjects, but had to deal with the constant pressure of living up to their expectations. Living in England, Huxley describes a very harsh class system in his novel, no doubt taken from the same system in his country. There was also an emergence of fascism throughout Europe, coupled with an economic depression, which also made their way into the book. Although fascism was just surfacing in the 1930's, Huxley saw the impending harms that could result from it, and so decided to use a totalitarian government in the book to illustrate this. Finally we see that social morals were changing, with a more open view of sexuality, more equality between man and woman, and a great deal of consumerism. These social changes sparked an interest in Huxley, and were exaggerated for the book.

When the book was first released it didn't receive much attention. However when a similar, more popular novel, 1984 was released people began to see the similarities between the two and further realized that Brave New World was a more realistic interpretation. The book touches on subjects of government and civilization as a whole, and the realism of his predictions on them are what shocked so many people.