The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1936, and it astonished the literary world by becoming a bestseller — a philosophical novel by a seventy-two-year-old retired professor, selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and read by hundreds of thousands of Americans who had never opened a philosophy book.
Oliver Alden is the “last puritan” — a young man of extraordinary intelligence, physical beauty, and moral seriousness who is paralyzed by his own conscience. Born into a wealthy Boston family, he has every advantage: money, education, talent, social position. But he cannot enjoy any of them because enjoyment seems to him frivolous, and he cannot pursue pleasure because pursuit of pleasure seems to him ignoble. He goes through life doing his duty perfectly and feeling nothing — or rather, feeling only the obligation to feel nothing.
Santayana’s portrait of Oliver is both sympathetic and diagnostic. He understands the Puritan temperament from inside (he spent forty years at Harvard among the heirs of New England Puritanism) and he admires its moral seriousness — but he sees it as a spiritual disease, a form of life that destroys life in the name of living rightly. Oliver’s foil is his cousin Mario Van de Weyer, a half-Italian, half-American boy who lives entirely by instinct and pleasure, and who is happy where Oliver is merely good.
The novel is also a panorama of American life from the 1890s to the First World War, rendered with the eye of a philosophical observer who loved America without ever being wholly American. Santayana, born in Spain and living in Rome when the novel was published, wrote about New England with the combination of intimacy and distance that only a permanent outsider can achieve.
Collecting The Last Puritan
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1936): Blue cloth, dust jacket. The Book-of-the-Month Club edition (different binding) is common; the trade first is less so.
Market values:
- First trade edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Book-of-the-Month Club edition: $5–$15