BySuzanne Raga|May 17, 2021, 8:00 AM EDT
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Best known for his 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley later wrote about his experimentation with psychedelic drugs. But there’s a lot more to Huxley’s life than dystopian novels. Here are 10 things you might not know about the author.
1. Aldous Huxley was almost completely blind as a teenager.
Born in Surrey, England in 1894, Huxley had a challenging early life. During his teenage years, his mother died of cancer, his brother died by suicide, and he began having problems with his vision. Following an infection, his corneas became inflamed (a condition called keratitis), and thus he couldn’t see well. In an interview with The Paris Review, Huxley explained that he was almost completely blind for a few years in his late teens: “I started writing when I was 17, during a period when I was almost totally blind and could hardly do anything else. I typed out a novel by the touch system; I couldn’t even read it,” he said.
2. Aldous Huxley struggled with eyesight for most of his life.
Historians debate the extent and duration of Huxley’s vision problems. In 1942, Huxley wrote The Art Of Seeing, a book in which he described how he regained his sight. He used the Bates Method, a series of suggestions—get natural sunlight, do eye exercises, and don’t wear glasses—for improving eyesight. The Art of Seeing was immediately attacked after its release by medical professionals for supporting pseudoscience, and questions remain about how much Huxley’s vision actually improved.
3. Aldous Huxley’s grandfather was a vocal proponent of evolution.
Huxley’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a biologist who advocated for the theory of evolution. Nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog,” he wrote, spoke, and participated in debates about the merits of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking theory. He also coined the word agnostic in 1869, describing it as the opposite of the gnostic of the Church, who said that they conclusively knew about how we came to exist.
4. Aldous Huxley taught George Orwell.
In 1917, Huxley briefly worked as a teacher at Eton, the esteemed boarding school in England. One of his students was Eric Blair, who later wrote 1984 and Animal Farm under the pen name George Orwell. Decades later, Orwell wrote in a 1946 magazine review that Huxley partially plagiarized Brave New World by using themes that appear in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1923 dystopian novel We. (Huxley’s classic was released in 1932.)
Despite Orwell’s accusation, Huxley sent a letter to Orwell in October 1949, praising his work in 1984 but also getting in a slight dig at his former pupil. Huxley wrote that his own bleak view of the future was a more accurate prediction than Orwell’s: “I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.”
5. Aldous Huxley wrote for Vanity Fair and Vogue.
In the early 1920s, Huxley contributed articles to a few magazines, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden. The future author of Brave New World wrote on a broad range of topics and later reflected on this time as a positive learning experience: As he recalled, “I used to turn out articles on everything from decorative plaster to Persian rugs … I did dramatic criticism for the Westminster Gazette. Why—would you believe it?—I even did music criticism. I heartily recommend this sort of journalism as an apprenticeship. It forces you to write on everything under the sun, it develops your facility, it teaches you to master your material quickly, and it makes you look at things.”
6. Aldous Huxley worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
In the 1930s, Huxley moved California. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he worked as a screenwriter, collaborating on films such as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Madame Curie. In 1945, Disney paid Huxley $7500 to write a treatment based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland that also incorporated Carroll’s biography. That December, Huxley had a meeting with Walt Disney and his staff about the project. Disney eventually decided not to proceed with Huxley’s script partly because it was, according to Disney, too literary.
7. Aldous Huxley’s commitment to pacifism precluded him from becoming an American citizen.
Huxley frequently wrote about Hindu and Buddhist spiritual ideas, pacifism, and mysticism. He renounced all war, and his pacifist views ultimately prevented him from becoming a U.S. citizen. After living in California for 14 years, Huxley and his wife applied for citizenship. However, he refused to say that he would, if necessary, defend the U.S. in wartime. Because his refusal to fight was based on philosophical rather than religious reasons, he realized the government would most likely deny his application, so he withdrew it before they had a chance to turn him down.
8. The Doors named their band after Aldous Huxley’s book about mescaline.
Jim Morrison’s band The Doors is named after Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception, though Huxley himself took the phrase the doors of perception from English poet William Blake. Although Huxley depicted the pernicious effects of the fictional drug soma in Brave New World, he volunteered for mescaline experiments and praised mescaline as physically harmless, potentially therapeutic, and spiritually enlightening in The Doors of Perception.
9. Aldous Huxley spoke of the potential dangers of overpopulation.
In a May 1958 interview with Mike Wallace, Huxley shared his beliefs about the dangers of overpopulation. Describing how overpopulation means that people will have less food to eat and fewer goods to use per capita, Huxley warned that a precarious economy leads to a more powerful central government and social unrest. “I think that one sees here a pattern which seems to be pushing very strongly towards a totalitarian regime,” Huxley said.
10. Aldous Huxley’s death wasn’t highly publicized due to JFK’s assassination.
On November 22, 1963, Huxley died of cancer of the larynx, three years after he was diagnosed with the illness. His death received little notice because he died on the same day that then-President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. British author C.S. Lewis also died that day, and his death similarly got little immediate attention.
For more fascinating facts and stories about your favorite authors and their works, check out Mental Floss’s new book, The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists, out May 25!
A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2021.
20 Things Every ’70s Kid Remembers That Have Completely Disappeared
Before smartphones, streaming, and the internet took over, everyday life was filled with simple pleasures and technologies that have all but gone extinct.
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Nov 1, 2026, 8:00 PM EST
It’s only natural that things change over time, but the pace of change over the last few decades has been head-spinningly quick.
In many ways, that’s made the world easier; staying and getting in touch with people, finding your way around, learning and finding things out, and even shopping and ordering what you want are all now far simpler and more readily available than they were in the past.
But that has had the somewhat less pleasant and more jarring consequence of consigning many of the technologies and experiences of yesterday to history, especially those from the 1970s. Here are 20 that have all but disappeared.
LANDLINE TELEPHONE CORDS
Long before cell phones became a thing, every house had a landline, which was really the only way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Thankfully, the cord on some landline telephones was so long that if you needed a quiet conversation away from your parents, you could take the handset in another room and close the door without stretching it too far.
CALLING THE HOUSE TO SPEAK TO ONE PERSON (WHO MIGHT NOT EVEN BE IN)
Unfortunately, having a landline meant you couldn’t get in touch with one person specifically, but had to call the entire house before narrowing it down to the one member of the household you wanted to reach. (Cue lots of awkward conversations between you and your best friends’ parents—especially if your friend didn’t happen to be in at the time…)
CALL CHARGES
One aspect of the telephones of the past that won’t be missed, however, is the often eye-watering difference between local and long-distance calls. Want to talk to your friend a few streets over? You could talk for hours for a pittance. Want to speak to your aunt or uncle two countries away? Give it ten seconds, tops.
KEEPING THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK
One more telephone-related aspect of the past that’s a little less simple these days? If you didn’t want to be disturbed, you could just take the phone off the hook and be uncontactable for however long you wanted. (These days, the best you can do is a do-not-disturb setting, or just turning your phone off altogether!)
RETURNING REUSABLES (IN EXCHANGE FOR HARD CASH)
These days, we all have household trash cans for recyclables, and recycling centers will handle most of your reusables cleanly and easily. In the past, though, it wasn’t uncommon for stores and restaurants to have their own in-house schemes for reducing waste, with stores often holding a few cents’ deposit on glass bottles and glasses, or giving a few cents back for returned cans. Some states have taken over these measures themselves, of course, but the days of taking them back to the stores you bought them from are largely long gone.
LASERDISCS
Watching films on discs is by no means anything new—it’s just the DVDs and BluRays of the 21st century are a lot smaller than the LP-sized LaserDiscs of the late 1970s.
CB RADIO SLANG
There was a time when CB radio was so widely used (one in five Americans owned a short-distance radio in the mid 1970s) that the chatter and slang you’d hear over them began to slip into everyday parlance. Whether that’s a “10-4,” a “meat wagon,” or a “good buddy,” many of these snapping turns of phrase have sadly fallen by the wayside.
TV ANTENNAE
On the subject of sending messages over the airwaves, there was a time when television sets came with movable antennae, Simpsons-style. In the era of smart TVs, though, these have largely become a thing of the past (so no need to wrap your TV aerial in aluminum foil anymore to improve the signal…)
CHANGING TV CHANNELS AT THE SET
Speaking of TVs, although the first commercial television remote control was made available back in 1950, by the 1970s many homes’ television sets still required manual channel-changing—variously achieved by either pressing, turning, or switching a series of (often rather noisy) control buttons or dials on the set itself. The technology might have changed, but we still talk of “tuning in” to television shows today even in the digital age.
APPOINTMENT TV
Digital and cable television, as well as streaming and catch-up services, have also done away with the so-called “appointment TV” era of the past too. There was a time when missing your favorite show meant precisely that—you’d missed your one chance to watch it, and would be left scouring the TV guide for weeks to come hoping to catch a rerun.
TV GUIDE MAGAZINES
With that last one in mind, TV guides are gradually disappearing too. Why pick up a printed magazine listing each and every show when you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want it—or, failing that, just surf the in-build TV guide at the bottom of the screen until you come across something you want to watch.
TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES
Not that TV shows were the only thing you had to browse by hand in weighty, information-heavy printed guides in the 70s, either. Business directories like the Yellow Pages listed every business in town across hundreds of pages, while the domestic phone directory did precisely that for home addresses. Want to know anything along those lines today, and it’s all online.
ROAD MAPS
Another printed resource that’s all but vanished today are road maps. Once the staple of every long-distance trip, and of every car glove compartment, these are becoming increasingly rare (outside of rural walks and hikes where mobile coverage and internet access might not be guaranteed!)
TRAVELER’S CHECKS
Another vacation staple of the 70s was the traveler’s check, which, unlike cash, had the added safety net of being reimbursable if lost or stolen. Ever more commonplace technologies like credit and debit cards, PIN numbers, and wireless payments have made these once widely used exchanges a thing of the past.
HITCHHIKING
Once a staple of many a cross-country trip (and many a movie based around it), hitchhiking reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, when someone thumbing a lift (or at least, trying to) was a common sight at practically every highway on-ramp.
SMOKING ON PLANES
Going on an overseas vacation in the 1970s, meanwhile, often meant enduring the smell of cigarette smoke on the long plane journey too. Not that airplanes were the only place where smoking was once tolerated—back in the seventies, smoking was all but universal, and you’d see people lighting up everywhere from shopping malls to (ironically enough) hospitals.
CIGARETTE VENDING MACHINES
In fact, smoking was once so widespread that these were all but universal too.
CHRISTMAS CATALOG SURFING
Wintertime, of course, means Christmas—and there was a time when Christmas meant perusing department store catalogs and circling everything that you’d like Santa to bring you. (These days, you’re perhaps more likely to drop it all in an online shopping cart and sit back and wait for it to be delivered.)
SEASONAL FRUIT
At the slightly healthier end of the seventies scale, however, the seasonality of fruits, vegetables and other produce was once far more widely followed than it is today. Nowadays, with industrial greenhouses, climate-controlled polytunnels and GM foods engineering ever-hardier varieties, even the softest of summer berries are often still available in the depths of winter.
HAVING NOTHING TO DO (OR ANYTHING TO PLAY WITH)
One of the effects of all this click-and-buy consumerism, however, is that real, genuine downtime seems to be a thing of the past. In an era of endless scrolling, streaming, and messaging, few of us find ourselves without anything to do and end up having to make our own fun armed with whatever toys, paper, and coloring pens we might have once had at our disposal.
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