Origins

From his birth in Madrid in 1863, to his death in Rome in 1952, George Santayana's life was outwardly placid but inwardly effervescent. Outwardly he conformed, willingly, to the rigid constraints of his time, but inwardly, radical scepticism and libertine speculation dominated. One result of that miscellany was a large and varied body of work, composed from age eight to age eighty-eight. Avila was an ancient, small place, but Madrid had some 300,000 inhabitants when Santayana was born there. It was the principal seat of the monarchy, the administrative center of Spain, and in theory, the center of its intellectual life. Signs of Santayana's mixed heritage are found early. At his baptism, his half-sister, Susana Sturgis, twelve years his senior, stood as his godmother and insisted that his name be not the Spanish "Jorge" but "George," in honor of her Bostonian father, long dead.