The Author and His Preparation
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894--1963) was already one of the 20th century's most prominent literary intellectuals when he turned his attention to mescaline. Born into the British scientific aristocracy -- his grandfather was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, his brother Julian a founding director of UNESCO -- Aldous had published novels (Brave New World, 1932; Point Counter Point, 1928), essay collections, and philosophical works that established him as a leading public thinker on technology, society, and consciousness.
By the early 1950s, Huxley had emigrated to California and was deeply engaged with Eastern philosophy, particularly Vedanta. He had read accounts of mescaline experiments by Weir Mitchell, Havelock Ellis, and Heinrich Kluver, and he was corresponding with the British-Canadian psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who was conducting clinical trials with mescaline at a Saskatchewan hospital.
