Santayana moved to Boston with his family in 1872 when he was only 9. Educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University, he received his PhD in 1889. He was a founding member of the Harvard Monthly and president of the Philosophical Club. He joined the faculty at Harvard as a professor of philosophy and his students included T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Walter Lippmann, Conrad Aiken and Felix Frankfurter. In 1912, he retired from Harvard and moved to England to become a full-time writer. His early publications showed his strong interest in aesthetics and literature and included Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), The Sense of Beauty (1896), Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), A Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems (1901), and his five-volume The Life of Reason (1905). Santayana remained in England, living in London, Oxford and Cambridge, until after the First World War. Thereafter, he travelled throughout Europe, eventually settling in Rome. Many attempts were made to lure him back to teaching by many universities, including Harvard, but he was determined to continue with his life as a writer and the intellectual freedom that it provided. When it became apparent that Mussolini was becominga complete dictator, Santayana attempted to leave Italy for Switzerland, but he was refused permission. In 1941, he entered a clinic run by a Catholic order of nuns and he remained there until his death from cancer in 1952. Santayana's other works include Winds of Doctrine (1913), Egotism in German Philosophy (1915), Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), Soliloquies in England (1922), Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931), Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (1933), his only novel, which became a best-seller, The Last Puritan (1935), Persons and Places (1944), The Middle Span (1945), The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946), Dominations and Powers (1951) and My Host The World (1953-posthumous). He also produced the four-volume The Realms of Being (1927,30,38 and 1940). |
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