Antic Hay

Antic Hay is Aldous Huxley's wickedly satirical portrait of London's bright young things in the aftermath of World War I—a dazzling, darkly comic novel that established him as one of the twentieth century's sharpest social critics. First published in 1923, it remains a brilliantly observed chronicle of intellectual pretension, romantic folly, and the desperate pursuit of meaning in a world stripped of certainty.
Theodore Gumbril Jr., a mild-mannered schoolmaster, abandons his teaching post to make his fortune with a ridiculous invention: pneumatic trousers designed for comfortable sitting. His entrepreneurial scheme draws him into the orbit of London's bohemian set—a gallery of grotesques including the cynical rake Mercaptan, the hapless artist Lypiatt, the coldly beautiful Myra Viveash, and the manipulative Coleman.
As Gumbril navigates affairs of the heart and commerce, Huxley constructs a devastating anatomy of post-war society: the shallow aestheticism, the desperate hedonism, the intellectual games that substitute for genuine feeling. The novel's title, taken from a Renaissance dirge ("Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust"), signals its underlying melancholy beneath the comic surface.
Written with Huxley's characteristic wit, erudition, and piercing psychological insight, Antic Hay anticipates the themes he would explore more fully in Brave New World—the emptiness of pleasure-seeking, the futility of intellectual posturing, and the human need for authentic connection in an increasingly mechanized age.
This LibriHouse.com edition presents all twenty-two chapters of Huxley's modernist masterpiece.