ABSTRACT
When Walter Lippmann's A Preface to Morals appeared in 1929, the literary critic Edmund Wilson suggested that it be compared to a recent work by T. S. Eliot. As cultural figures Lippmann and Eliot did have much in common. The world looked far brighter a century earlier. Lippmann was born in New York City in 1889, a period that basked in the warm glow of Victorian optimism. He attended a select boys' academy in New York and went to Harvard in 1906 at a time when the walls of academe were cracking and the fissures seeping with iconoclasm. Lippmann incorporated much of Santayana's sensibility into A Preface to Morals, especially the ethic of lonely detachment, the conception of life as reaching for the highest standards of excellence, and meditating and writing as an effort to envisage the beauty and tragedy of the human spirit.
