"When Aldous Huxley died on 22 November 1963, on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and wide-ranging English writers of the twentieth century. Associated in the public mind with his dystopian satire, Brave New World, and experimentation with drugs that preceded the psychedelic (a term he invented) era of the 1960s, Huxley seemed to embody the condition of twentieth-century man in his restless curiosity, his search for meaning in a post-religious age, and his concern about the misuses of science and the future of the planet." "Huxley emerges from this new biography as one of the most interesting and complex figures of twentieth-century English writing - novelist, poet, biographer, philosopher, social and political thinker. In an era of intense specialisation he remained a free-ranging thinker, unconfined by conventional categories, concerned to communicate his insights in ordinary language - a very English intellectual."--BOOK JACKET.