Aldous Huxley

English writer, philosopher, and one of the great literary explorers of the perennial philosophy and the chemistry of consciousness in the twentieth century. Born in 1894 to one of the most distinguished intellectual families in England, he authored more than fifty books — novels (Brave New World, Island), essays (The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell), and his late masterpiece The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which gathered the testimony of mystics from every world tradition into a single anthology. His mescaline experiments in the 1950s pioneered the modern psychedelic movement; his lifelong study of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism made him one of the West's most credible bridges to the contemplative East. He died in Los Angeles in 1963, on the same day as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.