Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
John William Van Druten was an English playwright and theatre director. He began his career in London, and later moved to America, becoming a U.S. citizen. He was known for his plays of witty and urbane observations of contemporary life and society.
Swami Prabhavananda was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher. He moved to America in 1923 to take up the role of assistant minister in the San Francisco Vedanta Society. In 1928 he was the minister of a small group in Portland, OR, but in 1930 he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The Swami spent the rest of his life there, writing and collaborating with some of the most distinguished authors and intellectuals of the time, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard.
Girish Chandra Ghosh was a Bengali actor, director, and writer. He was largely responsible for the golden age of Bengali theatre. He cofounded the Great National Theatre, the first Bengali professional theatre company in 1872, wrote nearly 40 plays and acted and directed many more, and later in life became a noted householder disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.
Vedanta Societies refer to organizations, groups, or societies formed for the study, practice, and propagation of Vedanta, the culmination of Vedas. More specifically, they "comprise the American arm of the Indian Ramakrishna movement" and refer to branches of the Ramakrishna Order located outside India.
Jon Monday is an American producer and distributor of CDs and DVDs across an eclectic range of material such as Swami Prabhavananda, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Huston Smith, and Chalmers Johnson. In 1980 Monday filmed what turned out to be the very last live poetry reading Charles Bukowski gave, at the Sweetwater in Redondo Beach, which was released as The Last Straw on DVD. Monday directed and co-produced with Jennifer Douglas the feature-length documentary Save KLSD: Media Consolidation and Local Radio. He is also President of Benchmark Recordings, which owns and distributes the early catalog of The Fabulous Thunderbirds CDs and a live recording of Mike Bloomfield. After retiring, his work with Huston Smith and the Vedanta Society of Southern California has created audio and video commercial releases as well as establishing free online archives of the historic material.
Benjamin Saltman was an American poet and Professor of verse writing and contemporary American literature at California State University, Northridge. The Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award is given annually by Red Hen Press in his honor.
The Spiritual Heritage of India is a book written by Swami Prabhavananda (1893–1976), founder and head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California from 1930 until his death. Originally published in 1962 by Doubleday, the book has been republished with the same title in several later editions, including hardcover, paperback, and sound recording. It has been reviewed in magazines and professional journals. A foreword by Huston Smith was first included in a 1979 edition.
Vedanta Press is the publishing wing of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded in 1930 by Swami Prabhavananda. It publishes a number of important books in Indian philosophy and the Vedanta tradition, both original works and translations of Sanskrit scriptures. Vedanta Press published collaborations, original articles, and books by leading intellectuals of the 1940s to the present, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Fredrick Manchester, among others.
Swami Swahananda was a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order of India, and the minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of Southern California from 1976 to 2012. He also led the Vivekananda Retreat, Ridgely, and the Vedanta Center of Greater Washington, DC. He joined the Ramakrishna Order in 1947 and received sannyasa, full monastic ordination, in 1956.
Pravrajika Vrajaprana is a sannyasini or pravrajika at the Vedanta Society of Southern California, affiliated with the Ramakrishna Order. She resides at Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara, California and a writer on Vedanta, the history and growth of the Vedanta Societies.
Who Are We? is a 1955 recording of Aldous Huxley giving a lecture at the Vedanta Society of Southern California's Hollywood temple. The lecture was originally recorded on a wire recorder and digitally transferred to CD. Huxley was a student of Swami Prabhavananda, who founded the Society. Along with Christopher Isherwood and other notable disciples of the Swami, Huxley would occasionally give lectures at the society's temples in Hollywood and Santa Barbara.
Built and dedicated in 1956, the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple is located on a 45-acre (18 ha) property situated between the foothills above the City of Santa Barbara and below the peaks of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The temple has a clear view overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands of California.
Huxley on Huxley is a 2009 documentary directed by Mary Ann Braubach, narrated by Peter Coyote and includes interviews with Laura Huxley, drummer John Densmore, spiritual leader Ram Dass, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, artist Don Bachardy, philosopher Huston Smith and actor Nick Nolte, star of the adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1955 novel The Genius and the Goddess. The film features archival footage of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Mike Wallace, and Igor Stravinsky, and photographs from Laura and Aldous Huxley’s personal collection, as well as other historical archives.
Swami Vidyatmananda was born John Yale. He studied under Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society of Southern California and was ordained as a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission in 1964. He traveled to India and recorded his impressions in the book, A Yankee and the Swamis: A Westerner's View of the Ramakrishna Order. He also edited the journal Vedanta and the West and compiled a selection of the teachings of Swami Vivekananda in What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda which contains an introduction by Christopher Isherwood. He was an assistant to Swami Ritajananda at the Centre védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France, where he served as the center's manager until his death on March 22, 2000, at the age of 86. He edited the magazine Vedanta and the West and corresponded with many Western intellectuals including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Walter de la Mare, E. M. Forster, and Gerald Heard. His autobiography The Making of a Devotee reveals his spiritual evolution.
The monastery was originally developed in 1942 during WWII by Gerald Heard, a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern California an American branch of the Ramakrishna Order of India. Established as Trabuco College, it was originally meant to be a religious, non-sectarian, co-ed monastery, unaffiliated with any particular religious organization. Aldous Huxley, a close friend of Heard, spent 6 weeks there working on his book The Perennial Philosophy.
The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.
Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God is the title of the Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood's translation of the Bhagavad Gītā, an important Hindu scripture. It was first published in 1944 with an Introduction by Aldous Huxley. This translation is unusual in that it is a collaboration between a world-renowned English language author and an adept in Vedanta Philosophy and Hindu scripture. With this translation, "...the very purpose of life in Hindu terms becomes luminously clear." The 2023 edition includes the standardized verse markings that were left out from the original, published in 1944.
Gerda Ursula Zinn was a German film and voice actress.
