Persons and places

This is the MIT Press' 1987 one-volume critical edition of "George" Santayana's autobiography. It includes much material not found in Scribner's original, 1940s, three-volume publication. This RICHLY AND PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED MIT Press edition is THE ONE TO HAVE. Although a major figure in American philosophy, writer of one of the finest novels set in America (The Last Puritan) and an aknowledged master of English prose, Jorge Ruíz de Santayana (1863-1952) was born in Ávila, Spain, of Spanish parents and retained his Spanish nationality until his dying day, never becoming an American citizen. He wound up in Boston because his mother's first husband, the captain of a yankee clipper, was a Sturgis from Cod city. They met and married in the Philippines, then a Spanish colony. After this brief marriage, which produced 3 Sturgis children, including the only person Santayana ever truly loved, his half-sister Susana Sturgis, the widowed Mrs Sturgis married Santayana's father, an elderly Spanish colonial official. They soon separated and at age 6 little Jorge, who could hardly be brought up in Ávila by his old father alone, was sent to his mother, who had taken up residence in Boston with her first husband's well-off relatives. While outwardly a successful émigré student, Santayana nursed deep anger against his mother (her portrait in these mémoires is devastating) and never forgave the slight done to his father, whose austere Castilian livelihood had not been able to compete with those Yankee greenbacks. Santayana studied at Harvard and in Germany and was aknowledged to be so brilliant he was offered a teaching post at Harvard when hardly out of graduate school. But the powers-that-be there never liked him, or he them. His haughty, very "foreign" outward appeareance, all dressed in black like a Castilian; his cold sardonic humour; his atheism; his paradoxical love for the Catholic esthetic; his political conservatism; his homosexuality: all these were inimical to the worthy Brahmins who ran the University. On his side, he despised their sentimental, smug progressivism; their senseless liberal religiosity; their childish moral earnesteness--all concealing a brutal sense of entitlement and power. Santayana's successive promotions to eventual full-professorship were systematically delayed, notwithstanding his being one of the most celebrated members of the faculty. Once the crown was conferred upon him, though, he threw it in their faces, resigning his professorship in 1912. The proud Eternal Outsider moved to Europe (England, Spain, Italy) were he lived the remaining 40 years of his life. He never set foot in the US again. This autobiography is one of the most fascinating such documents ever created. All people depicted are unforgettably etched in acid, with a calm Pascalian insight into their souls that is almost terrifying. Santayana was a profound skeptic of human sentiments, an austere, stoic Spanish Epicurean writing the richest Emers