After the publication of Brave New World, Huxley left England, living with his wife, Maria, first in New Mexico—the site of the Savage Reservation in Brave New World—and later in California, where surgery restored much of his vision.
In his new home, Huxley became involved in the study and practice of mysticism. His new philosophical outlook informed his novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936), which promoted pacifism on the eve of World War II. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) makes the case for the emptiness of materialism. Gradually, Huxley moved toward mystical writings, far from the tone of his early satire. The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and The Doors of Perception (1954) represent Huxley’s non-fictional expression of his interests, including even experimentation with psychedelic drugs.
In Los Angeles, Huxley wrote screenplays for film versions of fictional classics such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Alice in Wonderland. He also continued writing fiction, notably Ape and Essence (1948), a futuristic fiction set in Los Angeles after a nuclear war. With Grey Eminence (1941) and The Devils of Loudon (1952), Huxley looked backward to historical events to examine what he believed to be the hypocrisy of organized religion. In addition to his fiction and screenplays, the planning and writing of biographies, essays, and other works of non-fiction occupied him constantly during these years.
Huxley’s last novel, Island (1962), returns to the theme of the future he once explored so memorably in Brave New World. The later novel, in which Huxley tried to create a positive vision of the future, failed to come up to readers' expectations. Brave New World Revisited, a series of essays addressing the themes of his early novel, represents a more successful rethinking of future (and present) social challenges.
Huxley died of cancer in California on November 22, 1963. Although his novels—especially Brave New World—still enjoyed great popularity, Huxley’s death received little notice in the media at the time. The nation’s shock over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy overshadowed news of the writer’s death.
Honors and Awards
Huxley 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 accepted an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of California. The year before his death, he received the Companion of Literature from the British Royal Society of Literature.
