George Santayana At 150

Santayana at 150: International Interpretations is a collection of essays by seventeen authors celebrating the life and thought of Spanish–American philosopher George Santayana. This book appears on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Santayana’s birth. Appropriately, the authors come from both sides of the Atlantic and put forth a range of insights that demonstrate the continuing life and relevance of Santayana’s thinking. The book includes considerations of the major themes of his philosophy—materialism, naturalistic ethics, and aesthetics—and of the influence exerted on Santayana’s work by his life circumstances and geographic surroundings, especially of Rome.

The seventh and penultimate book of the letters of American philosopher George Santayana, covering the years 1941 to 1947 and including letters to such correspondents as Daniel Cory, John Hall Wheelock, Robert Lowell, and others. This penultimate volume of Santayana's letters chronicles Santayana's life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the Blue Sisters of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed (wearing well-mended gloves) in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age (he was 77 in 1941), Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had never been more at peace or more happy. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years.

The first comprehensive study of Santayana’s political thought as connected to his cultural criticism. It ranges over topics such as Santayana’s political ontology, his criticism of democracy, liberalism, and communism, his views on freedom and forms of human servitude.

Letters from the last years of Santayana's life, written as he completed Dominations and Powers, the final volume of his autobiography, and the one-volume abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason. This final volume of Santayana's letters spans the last five years of the philosopher's life. Despite the increasing infirmities of age and illness, Santayana continued to be remarkably productive during these years, working steadily until September 1952, when he died of stomach cancer, just three months short of his eighty-ninth birthday. Still living in the nursing home run by the "Blue Sisters" of the Little Company of Mary in Rome (now with such prewar luxuries as hot baths and central heating restored), Santayana completed his book Dominations and Powers, which had been more than fifty years in the making, the final part of his autobiography Persons and Places, published posthumously in 1953 as My Host the World, and the abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason, into a single volume--all while continuing to maintain a voluminous correspondence with friends and admirers. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Eight are written to such correspondents as the young American poet Robert Lowell (whom Santayana thinks of "only as a friend and not merely as a celebrity" and to whom he sends a wedding gift of $500); Ira D. Cardiff, the editor of Atoms of Thought, a collection of excerpts from Santayana's writings (which, Santayana complained, portrayed him as more akin to Tom Paine than Thomas Aquinas); Richard Colton Lyon, a young Texan who would later collect Santayana's writings about America in Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy (1968); and the humanist philosopher Corliss Lamont.

An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosophy, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana Scholarship.

From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University, and an honorary fellow of English and other literatures at the University of York, England. He is the author of Seagoing: Memoirs, Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Society, Fiction as Knowledge, American and European Literary Imagination, and Catastrophe and Imagination: English and American Writings from 1870 to 1950, all published by Transaction.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.