Other editions of book Crome Yellow

Crome Yellow is the first novel written by Aldous Huxley. The action is set in an English country house where a group of visitors leech off the generous host of the party. The book is notable for satirizing British house parties at the time. Aldous Huxley was one of the most famous English writers and philosophers in the twentieth century. Huxley was considered to be one of the great intellectuals of his time and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

"Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write.The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley's later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an ""impersonal generation"" of the future that will ""take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."""

"Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parodic version of Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot used to gather and write.The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley's later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an ""impersonal generation"" of the future that will ""take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."""

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, on 26th July 1894.He was educated for a time by his mother and then entered Oxford University and obtained a degree in English Literature.As a young man he contracted the eye disease keratitis punctate, that left him, to all intents, blind for almost three years until partial sight was restored. It was to trouble him for the rest of his life.During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, near Oxford, working as a farm labourer where he met several members of the Bloomsbury set. In 1919 he met and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys. Their son, Matthew, was born on 19th April 1920.By now he had written several volumes of poetry and some short stories. Now he pursued novels.In ‘Crome Yellow’ (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. He followed up with further social satires, ‘Antic Hay’ (1923), ‘Those Barren Leaves’ (1925), and ‘Point Counter Point’ (1928).In 1937 Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife and child. He would live in the U.S., mainly in southern California, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico, until his death. As a Hollywood screenwriter Huxley used much of his earnings to bring Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. He worked for many of the major studios including MGM and Disney. In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state his objections, he had to withdraw his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In the spring of 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline. Undoubtedly, he was drawn to their mind-altering powers and was a firm believer thereafter.In 1955, Maria Huxley died of cancer.The following year, 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera, also an author, as well as a violinist and psychotherapist. She would later write ‘This Timeless Moment’, a biography of Huxley.Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel ‘Island’, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities". On his deathbed, unable to speak due to advanced laryngeal cancer, Huxley made a written request to Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." She obliged with an injection at 11:20 a.m. and a second dose an hour later; Aldous Leonard Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. on 22nd November 1963.

First published in 1921, Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's much-acclaimed debut novel.On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive History of Crome. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley's later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an 'impersonal generation' of the future that will 'take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.'"Delightful. Crome Yellow is witty, worldly and poetic"--The TimesAbout the authorAldous Leonard Huxley (1894--1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books--both novels and non-fiction works--as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.Huxley was a humanist and pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism and universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945)--which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism--and The Doors of Perception (1954)--which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

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)[1] Thomas Love Peacock’s country-house novels.[2] 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."[3]

A witty recounting of a house party, wherein Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time--we hear the history of the house 'Crome' from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. The protagonist, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.