1894 – 1963 · A portrait
A novelist who nearly went blind as a teenager turned from medicine to writing, imagined a chilling future in 1932, then spent later decades arguing that mystics across traditions describe one reality in different languages.
An eye illness around 1911 left him nearly blind for months and permanently weakened his sight, ending any hope of the medical career he had planned. He turned to literature instead, reading by touch and magnification for the rest of his life.
In 1932 he published Brave New World, imagining a future stabilized by pleasure and engineering rather than force — a warning, he later said, about a technically perfected society with nothing worth wanting left in it.
Close to Vedanta teachers in Southern California since the late 1930s, he argued in The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, that Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic mystics were describing one underlying reality in the language of their own traditions.
In 1954 he described his own experience with mescaline in The Doors of Perception, saying it seemed to confirm what he had written about mysticism. The book is held as his own account, not a guide — it gives no instructions for anyone to follow.
He died at home in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination. Dying of cancer, he asked his wife Laura for help easing the passage, and she stayed with him to the end.