Now More Than Ever (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series) - Softcover

Huxley, Aldous

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292728662 ISBN 13: 9780292728660

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2000

Synopsis

Over the course of his career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an atheistic outlook toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underlies the previously unpublished play Now More Than Ever.

Written in 1932-1933 just after Brave New World, Now More Than Ever is a response to the social, economic, and political upheavals of its time. Huxley's protagonist is an idealistic financier whose grandiose schemes for controlling the means of production drive him to swindling and finally to suicide. His fate allows Huxley to expose the evils he perceives in free-market capitalism while pleading the case for national economic planning and the rationalization of Britain's industrial base.

This volume contains the full text of Now More Than Ever, which was believed to be lost until 1976, when a copy was found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A "thinker's play" that has never been produced on stage, it is the last previously unpublished piece of Huxley's major writings and immensely important to understanding his development as a writer. The editors of this volume have annotated the play for contemporary readers. Their introduction sets the play in the context of Huxley's intellectual life.

About this title

About the Author:

David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford.

From Library Journal:

More of a historical curiosity than a functional drama, this previously unpublished play by Huxley (1894$1963) offers readers another dimension to the creator of the novel Brave New World and the play The World of Light. Huxley!s three-act drama expresses the daughter!s outrage by contrasting the world of a wealthy 1920s speculator and his daughter with that of a poor, idealistic Communist. Though the rich daughter falls in love with the struggling activist, all ends badly when the financial walls tumble around the father, who subsequently kills himself. Huxley worked on the play for several decades, but it was never produced on the stage. Introductory material and textual annotations furnish the play!s context within the body of Huxley!s work. For literature and theater collections."J. Sara Paulk, Coastal Plain Reg. Lib., Tifton, GA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0292728662
• ISBN 13: 9780292728660
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 123
• Editor: Bradshaw David, Sexton James