CollectedEssays-UV.docVIP

Collected Essays by Aldous Huxley Back Cover: All over the English-speaking world critics have greeted these essays with such comments as brilliant. . . provocative. . . magnificent. Many find that Huxley is the finest essayist since Montaigne. It has been said that Mr. Huxley is not only a literary giant, but one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Mr. Huxleys topic is man, the total compass of his faculties in science, literature, music, religion, art, love, sex, speculative thinking and simple being. Here, displayed to the full, is the astonishing virtuosity of Huxleys genius. The range of Aldous Huxleys thinking was astonishing. His opinions on art were as original and well-founded as his discussions of biology or architecture, poetry, music, or history. As a virtuoso of letters, he was unequalled. Born into a famous family with a long intellectual tradition, Huxley attended Eton and Oxford. His reputation as a writer was well-established before he was thirty. Mr. Huxley was not only a master essayist; in 1959 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for having done the best work of our time in what threatens to be a neglected field, the novel of ideas. His novels include Crome Yellow and The Genius and the Goddess. Preface I am a man and alive, wrote D. H. Lawrence. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. . . Only in the novel are all things given full play. What is true of the novel is only a little less true of the essay. For, like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover alm