The work also marked a change in Huxley himself. The setting of Brave New World — a future London rather than the familiar country houses and town houses of his previous fiction — seems to have broken Huxley out of some habits of mind. In Brave New World, Huxley takes the problem of evil much more seriously than in the past. The satirist had begun to evolve into the social philosopher.
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.
