Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963) [Video]

Aldous Hux­ley put him­self for­ev­er on the intel­lec­tu­al map when he wrote the dystopi­an sci-fi nov­el Brave New World in 1931. (Lis­ten to Hux­ley nar­rat­ing a dra­ma­tized ver­sion here.) The British-born writer was liv­ing in Italy at the time, a con­ti­nen­tal intel­lec­tu­al par excel­lence.

Then, six years lat­er, Hux­ley turned all of this upside down. He head­ed West, to Hol­ly­wood, the newest of the New World, where he took a stab at writ­ing screen­plays (with not much luck) and start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with mys­ti­cism and psy­che­delics — first mesca­line in 1953, then LSD in 1955. This put Hux­ley at the fore­front of the coun­ter­cul­ture’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with psy­che­del­ic drugs, some­thing he doc­u­ment­ed in his 1954 book, The Doors of Per­cep­tion.

Hux­ley’s exper­i­men­ta­tion con­tin­ued until his death in Novem­ber 1963. When can­cer brought him to his deathbed, he asked his wife to inject him with “LSD, 100 µg, intra­mus­cu­lar.” He died trip­ping lat­er that day, just hours after Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. Three years …