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

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C. Scribner's sons, 1936 - Young men - 600 pages
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. Oliver escapes puritanical self-destruction, the inability to celebrate life, through a form of self-knowledge that Santayana endorses throughout his moral philosophy.

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