ABSTRACT
The Last Puritan is a narrative concerning the antecedents, birth, career, and early death of Oliver Alden. The genre of The Last Puritan is neither that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister nor of Paters Marius. It is rather what the French call a roman a these, or novel of ideas. Lodged within Santayana's thesis is the denial of the possibility of Erziehung or Bildung, conceptions that assume a chameleon changeability at the center of the human psyche making for drama, for domination of experience, no matter what its derivation or direction. When Santayana began writing fiction as a young instructor at Harvard, in about 1891 to 1893, he intended a series of sketches of college life, centering on the Delphic Club, and offering for dramatic interest the contrast between a late Puritan, an Oliver, and a sybarite who could slip the punch of life, a Mario Van de Weyer.
