Island

Island is a 1962 novel by English writer Aldous Huxley, the author's final work before his death in 1963. The novel is the account of "Will Farnaby," a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of "Pala." Island is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. The ideas eventually becoming Island can be seen in a foreword he wrote in 1946 to a new edition of Brave New World.

     Island explores many of the themes and ideas that interested Huxley in the post-World War II decades and were the subject of many of his non-fiction books of essays, including Brave New World Revisited, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Some of these themes and ideas include overpopulation, ecology, modernity, democracy, mysticism, entheogens (plant-based chemicals), and somatotypes (the disproven belief personality traits were associated to human body shape and physique type).