Letters of Aldous Huxley, Ex Libris Gore Vidal
[Ex Libris Gore Vidal] Smith, Grover. Letters of Aldous Huxley. First Edition. 1969. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in very good minus condition—jacket shows a small chip to the lower spine and mild fraying. Book is stamped “From the library of GORE VIDAL” on the flyleaf.
There is no correspondence to Gore Vidal in this hefty, near-one-thousand-page book. However, Vidal and Huxley were longtime acquaintance/friends, having met in Huxley’s early years living in Los Angeles. These letters span the length of Huxley’s life, from his early youth, to the publication of Brave New World, through his late years when he pondered metaphysics and corresponded with Timothy Leary about psychedelic drugs. Huxley was not only a man of arts and letters, he was a man of the world, and much of the material concerns his insight into life’s vexing paradoxes and unfathomable mysteries.
“We are in the midst here of the most ghastly fire, compared to which what happened last May was no more than a Guy Fawkes day display. If the drought continues, Los Angles is really done for—or at least so it seems under existing circumstances.”
--Aldous Huxley, November 7, 1961