Aldous Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, but was also latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He was also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank. (source: Wikipedia) Huxley's first collection of short stories contains seven visionary and satirical tales, which introduces themes that will go on to form the basis of his entire works. The events and the protagonists of these stories, with their personalities falling between the explicit and the elusive, are also rich in parallels and points in common with the life of their author. In The Death of Lully a woman is struck by breast cancer, the disease that killed the young author's mother to whom he was very close; and suicide as that of his brother, recurs in Eupompus Gave Splendour To Art By Numbers. Among all, however, Farcical History Of Richard Greenow takes the form of an autobiography, from the setting to the events described, there are many points of contact between the protagonist and that of the author: like a new Dr Jekyll's alter ego protagonist (and the same Huxley) will face his personal Mr. Hyde, in the staging of the struggle between two different and irreconcilable ways of thinking about literature and civic engagement.