1. Brave New Writer

2.  Distinguished, rich, privileged, famous scientific and literary family.  Grandfather Thomas Huxley was a biologist who favored Darwinism and lectured on it. Coined the word “agnostic” (a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience) and made important evolution discoveries about jellyfish.  Father Leonard Huxley was a biographer, editor, and poet. Well-known as theorist about education.  Mother Julia Arnold was the niece of poet Matthew Arnold, who lamented the loss of religion in the world.

3.  When Huxley was 14 his mother died of cancer and when he was 20 his brother committed suicide.  Huxley suffered from an eye disease at 16 and became for a period of about 18 months totally blind.  Special glasses and one eye recovered; also learned Braille.  Unable to pursue his chosen career as a doctor/scientist - or fight in World War.  Became a writer.

4.  Lived in Italy for most of his adult life.  Hated conformity and denounced orthodox attitudes.  Dramatized intellectual debate in fiction.  Discussed philosophical and social topics in a volume of essays.  Critical of Western civilization in the 1930s.  Brave New World (1932), satirical account of an inhumane society controlled by technology.

5.  Huxley's distress at what spiritual bankruptcy of the modern world led him toward mysticism.  Moved to southern California in 1937 hoping it would help his eyesight.  Had surgery; did improve his sight.  Became a Hindu and a vegetarian.  Experimented with the hallucinogenic drug, mescaline.  Became a hippie guru.  Remembered as a moral philosopher who used fiction as a vehicle for philosophical ideas.

6.  Written in 1931 when people longed for a newer, simpler, more secure world following stock market crash and drought in America.

7.  SATIRE: Uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions.  Formal satire speaks directly to the reader or to a character in the work.  Horatian satire ridicules gently.  Juvenalian satire derides its subjects harshly and bitterly.

8.  Utopia term coined by Thomas More in 1516, this word means “nowhere.” More’s utopia presented a plan for the ideal republic.  Anti-Utopia Novel a novel that presents the idea of a “perfect world” as an impossibility. Ex: 1984 and Brave New World

9.  Novel of Ideas a novel in which the ideas the characters represent are more important than the characters themselves. Characters with opposing views are included, with the novel providing the setting for the conflict of these ideas.

10.  State control over new and powerful medical, biological, and psychological technologies.  Difference between science and technology: science searches for truth; technology applies, and often exploits, science.

11.  Excesses and shallowness of contemporary culture  Modern class structure  Individuality versus mass mentality  Happiness versus complacency  Social conditioning  Belongingness

12.  Eric Blair, Huxley’s student, went on to write 1984 under the penname, George Orwell.  Huxley wrote a series of essays about Brave New World called Brave New World Revisited in 1960s.  Huxley said he wished he’d written a more open-ended conclusion to Brave New World in which John finds a middle path between extremes.

14.  Brave New World opens in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-produces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies. Such a factory is a fitting place to begin the story of mass-produced characters in a techno-futurist dystopia, a world society gone mad for pleasure, order, and conformity. The date is A.F. 632, A.F. — After Ford — being a notation based on the birth year (1863) of Henry Ford, the famous automobile manufacturer and assembly line innovator who is worshipped as a god in Huxley's fictional society.

15.  Five genetic castes or classes inhabit this futurist dystopia. In descending order they are named for the first five letters of the Greek alphabet: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons.  While upper castes are bred for intellectual and managerial occupations, the lower castes, bred with less intelligence, perform manual labor.  All individuals are conditioned by electric shock and hypnopaedia (sleep conditioning) to reject or desire what the State dictates. For example, infants are taught to hate flowers and books, but encouraged to seek out sex, entertainment, and new products.  Most importantly, they are conditioned to be happiest with their own caste and to be glad they are not a member of any other group.

16. "Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too-all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides-made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions... Suggestions from the State." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 2