After Many a Summer
Huxley's satire of Hollywood's obsession with youth and mortality.
After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that satirizes American culture through the story of a Hollywood millionaire obsessed with avoiding death. Published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, it won the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The title derives from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, referencing the Greek myth of eternal life without eternal youth.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Aldous Huxley
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Philosophical novel
- Publisher
- Chatto & Windus (UK); Harper & Row (USA)
- Released
- 1939
- Format
- Print (hardback & paperback)
- Pages
- 314 (1962 hardback edition)
Facts from the source article.
Plot summary
The story centers on Jo Stoyte, a wealthy Hollywood millionaire in his sixties who fears death and hires Dr. Obispo and his assistant Pete to research longevity in carp, crocodiles, and parrots. Jeremy Pordage, an English archivist, is brought in to catalog Stoyte's rare book collection, highlighting the millionaire's shallow appreciation of art. Other characters include Virginia, Stoyte's young mistress, and Mr. Propter, a childhood acquaintance who lives on a small farm and advocates for mistreated laborers. Mr. Propter argues that individuality is illusory and that efforts should focus on actualizing a more-than-personal consciousness, seeing time and craving as the raw material of evil. He views any attempt to extend human lifespans as merely adding potential evil. Dr. Obispo, cynical and amoral, treats science as the ultimate good and pursues pleasure at others' expense, remaining trapped in ego-based behavior that prevents enlightenment.
Major themes
The novel presents various life philosophies through its characters in a Socratic manner, exploring mortality, eroticism, class struggle, mysticism, and greed. It incorporates scientific knowledge, particularly the evolutionary principle of neoteny—adult retention of juvenile traits—which suggests that extended lifespans would cause humans to become ape-like. Huxley likely learned of this 'fetalization theory' from anatomist Louis Bolk, possibly transmitted by his brother Julian, who researched delayed metamorphosis in amphibians. The story has been interpreted as Huxley's critique of early 20th-century American reality, with Jo Stoyte allegorizing William Randolph Hearst through his art acquisitions and opulent estate, and Virginia parodying Marion Davies. Orson Welles may have drawn inspiration from this novel for Citizen Kane, though the screenplays differ greatly.
Adaptations
NBC University Theater broadcast a radio adaptation on 12 December 1948 starring Paul Henreid and Alan Hale, Sr., with intermission commentary by Norman Cousins. A television movie titled After Many a Summer aired in 1967, directed by Douglas Camfield. In early 2000, the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation commissioned a 35-minute dance for the White Oak Dance Project called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The novel is mentioned in the novella and film A Single Man, where the protagonist places it in his briefcase alongside an empty pistol and discusses it with his class.
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