“YES, EVERYBODY’S HAPPY NOW”: FIRST EDITION OF BRAVE NEW WORLD

HUXLEY, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $8200.

First trade edition of Huxley’s haunting dystopian classic.

"A nightmarish prognostication of a future in which humanity has been destroyed by science… easily Huxley's most popular (and many good judges continue to think his best) novel" (DNB). "After the success of his first three novels, Huxley abandoned the fictional milieu of literary London and directed his satire toward an imagined future. He admitted that the original idea of Brave New World was to challenge H.G. Wells' Utopian vision… The novel also marks Huxley's increasing disenchantment with the world, which was to result in his leaving England for California in 1937 in search of a more spiritual life. The book was immediately successful" (Parker & Kermode, 161-62). It remains the "seminal dystopia… As argument and as satire, Brave New World is a compendium of usable points and quotable jibes… and has provided material for much subsequent fiction," not only within speculative fiction but also beyond it (Clute & Nicholls, 606). "Along with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is one of only two futuristic novels to have made a considerable contribution to the social and political rhetoric of the 20th century" (Anatomy of Wonder II-558). Preceded by the signed limited edition of 324 copies. Connolly 75. Books of the Century, 94-96. An English Library, 30.

Interior fine; spine lightly toned and creased. Bright dust jacket with shallow chipping and edge-wear. A near-fine copy.