Brave New World-Essay

Brave New World is Huxley's most famous novel. The ironic title ultimately derives from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in it!"
However, a derivation not only more recent but more apposite occurs in Rudyard Kipling's 1919 poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings:
"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
"When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins ..."
Translations of the novel into other languages often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature in an attempt to capture the same irony: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des Mondes (The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire.
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 while he was living in France and England (a British writer, he moved to California in 1937). By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, had published a collection of his poetry (The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels: Crome Yellow in 1921, Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925 and Point Counter Point in 1928. Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first attempt at a dystopian work.
Brave New World was inspired by the H. G. Wells' Utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia" (see dystopia), somewhat influenced by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D. H. Lawrence. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel...