George Santayana Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on George Santayana

George Santayana is perhaps best known for the critique of what he termed the "genteel tradition" in American philosophy, along with his dramatic departure from Harvard University and emigration from the United States in 1912. Santayana believed that American philosophical-literary culture was divorced from the nation's vital and indigenous currents and failed to nourish its most promising talents. Although a resident of the United States for forty years, he never took up American citizenship, remaining all his life a Spanish citizen before finally settling in Europe. He had a profound intellectual and aesthetic attraction to Catholicism and found the English-speaking Protestant world, so seminal to the intellectual culture of his environment, tortuous and foreign. A member of Harvard's Department of Philosophy during its Golden Age of 1880-1912, Santayana's reflections on colleagues and former teachers at Harvard such as William James and Josiah Royce blend philosophical analysis with considerations of personal temperament and cultural tradition.

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