Crome Yellow

Aldous Huxley

Feb 2011 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

Though Aldous Huxley would later become known as one of the key early figures in the genre of dystopian science fiction, his first novels were gentler satires that played on the manor house genre. Crome Yellow tells of the goings-on at a house called Crome, an artists' colony of sorts where thinkers and writers gather to work, debate, and sometimes, to fall in love.

About the author

Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Surrey, England, into a distinguished scientific and literary family; his grandfather was the noted scientist and writer, T.H. Huxley. Following an eye illness at age 16 that resulted in near-blindness, Huxley abandoned hope of a career in medicine and turned instead to literature, attending Oxford University and graduating with honors. While at Oxford, he published two volumes of poetry. Crome Yellow, his first novel, was published in 1927 followed by Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Point Counter Point. His most famous novel, Brave New World, published in 1932, is a science fiction classic about a futuristic society controlled by technology. In all, Huxley produced 47 works during his long career, In 1947, Huxley moved with his family to southern California. During the 1950s, he experimented with mescaline and LSD. Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, both works of nonfiction, were based on his experiences while taking mescaline under supervision. In 1959, Aldous Huxley received the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died on November 22, 1963.