Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the most enigmatic and dramatic of contemporary U. S. writers, from an exile that has lasted 24 years, offered readers his first novel, a work of art so astonishing in view of his past efforts, so unusual in its own right, that even dissenting critics could hail it as a piece of intellectual audacity without precedent in U. S. literature...
George Santayana, distinguished philosopher and poet who abandoned a brilliant academic career at Harvard in 1912, is now 72. The Last Puritan is a memoir in the form of a novel, ''partly a work of fiction, partly a discussion of U. S. manners and customs," partly a witty and civilized analysis of modern moral dilemmas. Long (602 pages), rambling, diffuse, The Last Puritan is the February choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Despite the fact that it is sensational only in an intellectual sense, contains none of the melodrama, none of the honeyed sentiments that make...
...Whether novel-readers could enjoy all parts of The Last Puritan, whether they could understand its full significance without some knowledge of Santayana's background and philosophical studies, seemed questionable. They might feel that the rippling, intellectual talk, full of subtle dialectical twists and adroit insight, which the philosopher puts into the mouths of his characters, was never heard on earth-or at least never in pre-War New England. They may feel also that the central character of a philosophical football player, a young millionaire who sickens and fades because his moral standards cannot be reconciled with...
...Novel. Central figure of Santayana's strange first novel is Oliver Alden, robust, grey-eyed, precociously-intelligent son of a wealthy, ambitionless New England family that has fallen into a vague and harmless melancholy. Oliver's father married only from a sense of duty, spends most of his time on his yacht, drifting about the world, while occasional intimations of his paganism and vice reach Great Falls, Conn., to scandalize the family and cloud the contentment of his wife. In a loveless household Oliver grows up, excels at games and studies without exerting himself, does not begin...
...last decision to some of the most eloquent prose that Santayana has written. Yet critics are likely to disagree for a long time to come over the question of whether The Last Puritan deserves to be reckoned with great U. S. fiction, whether it should even be considered a novel at all. Challenging comparison with The Scarlet Letter in its theme, it is obviously pale, frail, overintellectualized beside Hawthorne's masterpiece. Evil for Hawthorne's puritans was intense, powerful, a demon to be fought. For Santayana's characters it is distant, abstract, a moral problem...