Eyeless in Gaza: A Novel | Aldous Huxley | Best Counterculture Writing

One of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley’s finest and most personal novels, now back in print in a Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, Eyeless in Gaza is the story of one man’s quest to find a meaningful life, which leads him from blind hedonism to political revolution to spiritual enlightenment.

“A genius . . . a writer who spent his lifetime decrying the onward march of the Machine.” — The New Yorker

First published in 1936--and hailed as his best work--EYELESS IN GAZA is Aldous Huxley's loosely autobiographical novel of one man’s search for an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world. Anthony Beavis, a cynical libertine Oxford graduate, comes of age in the vacuum left by World War I. His life, loves, and foreign adventures leave him unfulfilled, until he meets a charismatic doctor who inspires Anthony to become a Marxist and join the Mexican revolution—a disastrous embrace of violence that leaves the doctor with one leg. Shattered by the experience, Anthony forges a new, quasi-Buddhist philosophy that embraces pacifism. EYELESS IN GAZA remains one of Huxley’s most enduring novels, a testament to the challenges and rewards of bold, vigorous thinking.