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After Many a Summer

After Many A Summer
or After Many A Summer Dies the Swan
After Many a Summer (UK 1st edition).jpg
First UK edition
Author Aldous Huxley
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre Philosophical novel
Publisher Chatto & Windus (UK)
Harper & Row (USA)
Publication date
1939
Media type Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages 314 p (1962 hardback edition)
ISBN (recent hardback edition)
OCLC 10092865
823/.912 19
LC Class PR6015.U9 A77 1983

After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death; it was published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Written soon after Huxley left England and settled in California, the novel is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. This satire also raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

The action revolves around a few characters brought together by a Hollywood millionaire, Jo Stoyte. Each character represents a different attitude toward life. Stoyte, in his sixties and conscious of his mortality, finds himself in deep contemplation of life. Enlightenment eludes him, though, as he is ruled by his fears and cravings. Stoyte hires Dr Obispo and his assistant Peter to research the secrets to long life in carp, crocodiles, and parrots. Jeremy Pordage, an English archivist and literature expert, is brought in to archive a rare collection of books. Pordage's presence highlights Stoyte's shallow attitude toward the precious works of art that he affords himself. Other characters are Virginia, Stoyte's young mistress; and Mr Propter, a professor who lives on a neighbouring estate. Mr Propter believes:

... every individual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being's efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualisation of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence.

This is essentially Huxley's own position. Though other characters achieve conventional success, even happiness, only Mr Propter does so without upsetting anyone or creating evil.


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