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. This edition of The Last Puritan was originally based on the typescript for the first part of the novel. The exciting discovery of the second half of the typescript in the fall of 1992 has resulted in a consistent copy-text throughout, making its text more firmly based on Santayana's intentions. Irving Singer's introduction takes up Santayana's philosophical and artistic concerns, including issues of homosexuality raised by the depiction of the novel's two protagonists, Oliver and Mario, and of the relationship between Oliver and the rogue character Jim Darnley. In his thoughtful analysis Singer finds the term "homosexual novel" too reductionist and imprecise for what Santayana is trying to achieve. Singer brings to light the author's skillful and inventive methods for perceiving and interpreting reality, including ideal forms of friendship, and his success in exploring the pervasive moral problems that people face throughout their existence. The Santayana Edition was initiated by members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This volume has been awarded the "Approved Edition" emblem of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions.

William G. Holzberger is Professor of English Emeritus at Bucknell University.

Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., is Head of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University.

George Santayana (1863–1952) was a philosopher, poet, critic, and novelist. The MIT Press has published The Letters of George Santayana in eight books and the five books of The Life of Reason.

Irving Singer was Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He was the author of the trilogies The Nature of Love and Meaning in Life, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up, Mozart and Beethoven: The Concept of Love in Their Operas, all published by the MIT Press, and many other books.