Crome Yellow Aldous Huxley – Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley’s first novel, satirizing the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a parody 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.
On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabited 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
Circa l’autore
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life, he was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.