A philosophical novelist

In the preface to the second edition of The Last Puritan, George Santayana wrote that he saw this "memoir in the form of a novel" as an exemplification of his own spirit. H. T. Kirby-Smith uses Santayana's 1936 novel The Last Puritan as both an occasion and a means for bringing into focus the complex relations between Santayana's life, his personality, and his philosophy.