The Last Puritan

This is a rare, first American printing of The Last Puritan, the only novel by celebrated philosopher and writer George Santayana. Written over forty-five years and first published in London in 1935, followed quickly by the U.S. edition in 1936, this richly textured philosophical novel became an unexpected bestseller, second only to Gone with the Wind in popularity in 1936.

A “memoir in the form of a novel”, it chronicles the life of Oliver Alden - an earnest, duty-bound young American raised in New England's rigid Puritan tradition - and his tragic struggle to reconcile moral obligation with the call of beauty, spontaneity, and European culture.