Now More Than Ever

Over the course of his long career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an uncompromising irreligion toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underpins the previously unpublished play Now More Than Ever. Written in 1932-1933 just after Brave New World, Now More Than Ever is a response to the social, economic, and political upheavals of its time. Huxley's protagonist is an idealistic financier whose grandiose scheme for industrial renewal drives him to swindling and finally to suicide. His fate allows Huxley to expose the evils he perceives in free-market capitalism while pleading the case for national economic planning and the rationalisation of Britain's industrial base. This volume contains the full text of Now More Than Ever, a play hitherto believed to be lost. A "thinker's play," it is the last of Huxley's major writings to be published and immensely important to understanding his development as a writer. The editors of this volume have annotated the play for contemporary readers. Their introduction sets the play in the context of Huxley's intellectual life. David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. James Sexton is a Lecturer in English at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia.