PERSONS AND PLACES (Hudson River Edition Series) [Board book]

George Santayana (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hudson River Edition Series | Publication Date: July 1, 1981

Philosopher, poet, critic of culture and literature, and best-selling novelist, George Santayana was unquestionably one of the great men of letters of our time. Persons and Places inaugurates a new definitive edition of Santayana's works that aims to come as close to his final intentions as possible. This first volume includes three books - Persons and Places, The Middle Span, and My Host the World - covering Santayana's youth, education, and teaching in Boston and Cambridge, his travels abroad, and ending shortly before his death in Rome in the early 1950s.

Persons and Places is the first unexpurgated version of Santayana's autobiography. substantially different from any previously published versions of Santayana's work, it restores 718 marginal headings and significant passages that have been omitted in the past, including lengthy sections on Spinoza, John Russell, Lionel Johnson, and members of Santayana's American family. All of this material was a part of Santayana's manuscript and was deleted from earlier publications for a variety of reasons, including his wish that portions be published only after his death, publishers' sensitivity about potential lawsuits, printing and production convenience, and a general desire to "soften" some of Santayana's remarks.

Physically, Persons and Places differs from other editions as well. Along with the restoration of marginal headings, which provide valuable information and often an indication of the author's tone, it includes Santayana's British spelling and punctuation as well as his idiosyncratic use of certain punctuation, and numerous photographs. Richard Lyon's Introduction is a significant contribution to American scholarship that not only explores Santayana's life and work but also enables us to understand the literary place of Persons and Places. The editorial apparatus includes a variants list, emendations list, notes to the text, discussions of adopted texts, and a section identifying persons mentioned in the autobiography.

The Santayana edition, with over 20 volumes planned in all, was initiated by members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. William G. Holzberger is Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. is Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Texas A&M University.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This first volume of the projected 19-volume definitive edition of Santayana's works includes three autobiographical books: Persons and Places, The Middle Span, and My Host the World. Material omitted in past editions (including remarks on Spinoza, John Russell, and Lionel Johnson and 718 marginal headings) is at last restored, and a useful introduction focuses on key events in Santayana's life that led to his sense of himself as "the inveterate stranger." While all this material is a boon to scholars, general readers will most appreciate the ease and insight of these memoirs, the philosophical reflections, the remarks on interesting personalities, and the portrait of turn-of-the-century America. Editorial apparatus and photos not seen. Richard Kuczkowski, Dir., Continuing Education, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"One of the major contributions in our generation to both philosophy and literature."
- W. Jackson Bate, Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University



"Now, impeccably edited and embellished by rare photographs, its omitted passages and marginal headings restored, and superbly introduced by Richard Lyon, [Persons and Places] appears in the one-volume form in which Santayana intended it to be read."
- Daniel Aaron, The New Republic



"This version of 'Persons and Places' is the new starting point for exploring the connection between Santayana's life and ideas."
- The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Board book: 600 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (July 1, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684168308
• ISBN-13: 978-0684168302
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,782,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The autobiography that defines the genre, January 1, 2006

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Charlus (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Persons And Places: Trade Edition (Paperback)

This is the MIT Press' 1987 one-volume critical edition of "George" Santayana's autobiography. It includes much material not found in Scribner's original, 1940s, three-volume publication.

This RICHLY AND PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED MIT Press edition is THE ONE TO HAVE.

Although a major figure in American philosophy, writer of one of the finest novels set in America (The Last Puritan) and an aknowledged master of English prose, Jorge Ruíz de Santayana (1863-1952) was born in Ávila, Spain, of Spanish parents and retained his Spanish nationality until his dying day, never becoming an American citizen.

He wound up in Boston because his mother's first husband, the captain of a yankee clipper, was a Sturgis from Cod city. They met and married in the Philippines, then a Spanish colony. After this brief marriage, which produced 3 Sturgis children, including the only person Santayana ever truly loved, his half-sister Susana Sturgis, the widowed Mrs Sturgis married Santayana's father, an elderly Spanish colonial official. They soon separated and at age 6 little Jorge, who could hardly be brought up in Ávila by his old father alone, was sent to his mother, who had taken up residence in Boston with her first husband's well-off relatives.

While outwardly a successful émigré student, Santayana nursed deep anger against his mother (her portrait in these mémoires is devastating) and never forgave the slight done to his father, whose austere Castilian livelihood had not been able to compete with those Yankee greenbacks.

Santayana studied at Harvard and in Germany and was aknowledged to be so brilliant he was offered a teaching post at Harvard when hardly out of graduate school. But the powers-that-be there never liked him, or he them. His haughty, very "foreign" outward appeareance, all dressed in black like a Castilian; his cold sardonic humour; his atheism; his paradoxical love for the Catholic esthetic; his political conservatism; his homosexuality: all these were inimical to the worthy Brahmins who ran the University.

On his side, he despised their sentimental, smug progressivism; their senseless liberal religiosity; their childish moral earnesteness--all concealing a brutal sense of entitlement and power.

Santayana's successive promotions to eventual full-professorship were systematically delayed, notwithstanding his being one of the most celebrated members of the faculty. Once the crown was conferred upon him, though, he threw it in their faces, resigning his professorship in 1912. The proud Eternal Outsider moved to Europe (England, Spain, Italy) were he lived the remaining 40 years of his life. He never set foot in the US again.

This autobiography is one of the most fascinating such documents ever created. All people depicted are unforgettably etched in acid, with a calm Pascalian insight into their souls that is almost terrifying. Santayana was a profound skeptic of human sentiments, an austere, stoic Spanish Epicurean writing the richest Emersonian English. A thousand times more percipient than Tocqueville, Santayana's point of view, the magisterial clarity with which it is propounded, are indeed uniquely prepossessing: here was the last philosopher of antiquity, mysteriously issued forth from medieval Ávila to address, in English, the corny foibles of the American century...in lucid Lucretian periods.

One can scarcely conceive of another book quite like this.