The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel

Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel and it became an instant best- seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. In Oliver's case the puritanical self-destruction that prevented him from realizing his own spirituality is transcended by his attainment of the type of self-knowledge that Santayana recommends throughout his moral philosophy.The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of George Santayana's wroks that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in this series — the first complete publication of Santayana's works — include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text (identifying persons, places, and ideas), textual commentary (including a description of the composition and publication history, along with a discussion of editorial methods and decisions), lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations.

• Author
• George Santayana, William J. Holzberger, Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., The Santayana Edition

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 794

• Publisher
• Bradford Book

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780262691789

• Characters
• Oliver Alden

• Settings
• Connecticut

• Genres
• fiction, philosophy, classics, literature, american

• Release date
• 1995