From the late Nineteenth Century until the middle of the Twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer, not only of philosophy but also of Poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best selling novel, The Last Puritan. This book is the first to treat Santayana's life and his work in the detail that this hitherto elusive figure deserves. His life was rich in its interiors and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Walter Lippmann, Conrad Aiken and Robert Frost were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and after World War II, the young Robert Lowell. And dominating everything else in his life, there is his work his continued efforts to refine his personal, sceptical, naturalistic philosophy, and his unfailingly graceful and witty prose style in the books that made his reputation.