Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley

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Résumé :
Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published by Chatto & Windus in 1921, followed by a U.S. 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 modelled on (and publicised as in the tradition of) Thomas Love Peacock's country-house novels. There diverse types of the period are exhibited interacting with each other and holding forth on their personal intellectual conceits. There is little plot development. Indeed, H. L. Mencken questioned whether its comedy of manners could be called a novel at all but hailed with delight the author's shrewdness, ingenuity, sophistication, impudence, waggishness and contumacy. At the same time F. Scott Fitzgerald observed how within the novel's ambiguous form Huxley created structures and then demolished them with something too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony. In addition, the open treatment of sexuality there appeared significant to Henry Seidel. Although Nothing important happens...the story floats and sails upon the turbid intensity of restless sex. (wikipedia.org)...

Biographie:
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 - 1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first class honours in English literature. The author of nearly fifty books, he was best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian future; for non-fiction works, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide-ranging output of essays. Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.