Aldous Huxley earned widespread attention in the 1920s as a promising young fiction writer who wrote brilliant and scathing stories about British writers and intellectuals gathered around socialite Ottoline Morrell. He soon became widely recognized as a literary and cultural critic, a polymath able to range over social, historical, scientific, and aesthetic matters with intelligence and aplomb. In 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, his best-known novel--which, with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), is among the most important dystopian novels of the twentieth century. Brave New World has been continuously in print since its first publication, and it put Huxley in the forefront of the socially and politically engaged writers of the 1930s. By the 1940s and 1950s Huxley was firmly established among educated, intelligent, "middle-brow" readers; his books ranked above best-sellers if not among the most "serious" or critically acclaimed literature. Following Huxley's...