Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley

In Dawn and the Darkest Hour, poet and author George Woodcock explores the famously complex life and career of Aldous Huxley. A brilliant and satirical novelist of ideas; a popular journalist and essayist on scientific and political subjects; a prophet of the future (Brave New World); a pioneer of psychedelic experimentation (The Doors of Perception), Huxley was a man plagued by excessive intellectual curiosity and a withdrawn melancholic nature. In the dramatic range of his characters and the encyclopedic quality of his thought, Huxley expressed some of the most interesting and disturbing commentary about the condition of human beings and their relationship to society.

As Woodcock traced the progress of Huxley’s works, he recognized attempts to bring about a synthesis of knowledge “that would give total meaning to existence.” In this striking and encompassing critical biography, Woodcock persuasively asks us to reconsider Huxley’s works as the stages of “a spiritual pilgrimage,” as he demonstrates that Huxley’s entire remarkable oeuvre must be taken as a whole, as a unified “movement out of darkness toward light.” It is a fascinating journey that provides a window into Huxley’s life and character, that shows an intellectual continually striving for knowledge—intuitive, scientific and otherwise—and as such, is certain to renew interest in one of the most the most important and influential minds of the twentieth century.

George Woodcock (1912 1995)—award-winning poet, author, essayist and widely known as a literary journalist and historian—published more than 90 titles on history, biography, philosophy, poetry and literary criticism.