Antic Hay

Antic Hay is a comic novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1923. The story takes place in London and depicts the aimless or self-absorbed cultural elite in the sad and turbulent times following the end of World War I. The book follows the lives of a diverse cast of characters in bohemian, artistic, and intellectual circles and has been called  by some as a "novel of ideas" rather than people. It expresses a mood of mournful disenchantment and reinforced Huxley's reputation as an iconoclast. It was written just after Huxley and his wife moved to Italy, where they lived from 1923-1927. The title is from the play Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. The manuscripts for the novel are part of the collection of the University of Houston Library. The book was condemned for its cynicism and for its immorality because of its open debate on sex. The novel was banned for a while in Australia and burned in Cairo.

       Superficially the story follows one Theodore Gumbril in his invention of Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes, trousers which contain a pneumatic cushion in the seat. Gumbril's quest for love occasionally makes him resort to utilizing "The Complete Man" which is a disguise he concocts around a false full beard. With it he is able to overcome his shyness and approach women in public places with a bold directness; however, he is then left with the problem of how he reveals his real self to the women he befriends.

Crome Yellow

Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published by Chatto & Windus in 1921, followed by a United States edition by George H. Doran Company in 1922. Though a social satire of its time, it is still appreciated and has been adapted to different media.

     Crome Yellow was written during the summer of 1921 in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi and published in November of that year. In view of its episodic nature, the novel was described in The Spectator as "a Cubist Peacock." This was in recognition of the fact that it was modeled on (and publicized as in the tradition of) Thomas Love Peacock’s country-house novels. 

Island

Island is a 1962 novel by English writer Aldous Huxley, the author's final work before his death in 1963. The novel is the account of "Will Farnaby," a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of "Pala." Island is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. The ideas eventually becoming Island can be seen in a foreword he wrote in 1946 to a new edition of Brave New World.

     Island explores many of the themes and ideas that interested Huxley in the post-World War II decades and were the subject of many of his non-fiction books of essays, including Brave New World Revisited, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Some of these themes and ideas include overpopulation, ecology, modernity, democracy, mysticism, entheogens (plant-based chemicals), and somatotypes (the disproven belief personality traits were associated to human body shape and physique type).

Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1928. It is Huxley's longest novel and was notably more complex and serious than his earlier fiction. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked Point Counter Point 44th on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century.

     The novel's title is a reference to the flow of arguments in a debate, and a series of these exchanges tell the story. Instead of a single central plot, there are a number of interlinked story lines and recurring themes (as in musical "counterpoint"). Many of the characters, even though given fictious names, are based on real people, most of whom Huxley knew personally, such as D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sir Oswald Mosley, Nancy Cunard, and John Middleton Murry, and Huxley is depicted as the novel's novelist, Philip Quarles.

Brave New World

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London in the year 2540 CE (632 AF—“After Ford”—in the novel), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning combined profoundly to change society. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with Island (1962), his final novel.

     In 1999 the Modern Library ranked Brave New World No. 5 on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century. In 2003 Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at No. 53 in “the top 100 greatest novels of all time,” and the novel was listed at No. 87 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read.