Series:

Works of George Santayana

6 total works

Cover of Letters of George Santayana, Volume 5, Book 5: 1933-1936. the Works of George Santayana

Cover of Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven: 1941-1947, The: Works of George Santayana, The: Volume V

Cover of The Letters of George Santayana, Book Three, 1921-1927
Book Three of George Santayana's letters covers a period of intense intellectual activity in Santayana's life, and the correspondence reflects the establishment of his mature philosophy. Santayana becomes more permanently established in Italy, but continues to travel in France, Spain, and England. The year 1927 marks the beginning of his long friendship with Daniel Cory, who became his literary secretary and eventually his literary executor. Also, with the death of Santayana's half-brother Robert, George Sturgis, Robert's son, becomes an important part of Santayana's life and letters as his financial manager. Santayana continues to write to his sister Susana, as well as to numerous friends and fellow philosophers, including Bernard Berenson, Robert Seymour Bridges, Curt John Ducasse, John Erskine, Horace Meyer Kaller, Lewis Mumford, George Herbert Palmer, John Francis Stanley Russell, Herbert Wallace Schneider, Charles Augustus Strong, Paul Weiss, and Harry Austryn Wolfson. Other correspondents include Wendell T. Bush, Alys Gregory, Marianne Moore, John Middleton Murray, and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge.

Cover of The Letters of George Santayana, Book One [1868]-1909

The Works of George Santayana, Volume V, brings together a total of 3,081 letters. Book One covers the longest period of time, in effect spanning Santayana's correspondence from the 1880s through most of the first decade of the twentieth century.

edited and with an introduction by William G. Holzberger Since the first selection of George Santayana's letters was published in 1955, shortly after his death, many more letters have been located. The Works of George Santayana, Volume V, brings together a total of 3,081 letters. The volume is divided chronologically into eight books of roughly comparable length. Book One covers the longest period of time, in effect spanning Santayana's correspondence from the 1880s through most of the first decade of the twentieth century. It illuminates Santayana's life from the age of nineteen until well into his middle years, when he had established his professional career as a full professor at Harvard.In his introduction, William Holzberger summarizes their significance as follows: "We find in Santayana's letters not only a distillation of his philosophy but also a multitude of new perspectives on the published work. The responses to his correspondents are filled with spontaneous comments on and restatements of his fundamental philosophical ideas and principles. Because Santayana's philosophy was not for him a thing apart, but rather the foundation of his existence, the letters indicate the ways in which his entire life was permeated and directed by that philosophy."

Cover of The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952
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.William G. Holzberger is Professor of English Emeritus at Bucknell University.

Cover of The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress, The: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two