The Letters of George Santayana, Book Six, 19371940

The sixth book of the letters of American philosopher George Santayana, covering the years 1937 to 1940. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. This sixth book covers four years of Santayana's life in Rome, his permanent residence since the late 1920s. During these years, Santayana, in his seventies, saw the publication of the remaining nine volumes of the Triton Edition of his work as well as the last two books of his Realms of Being: The Realm of Truth and The Realm of Spirit. In 1938 the first book-length biography of Santayana was published, and in 1940 The Philosophy of George Santayana-a collection of critical essays that included Santayana's rejoinder, "Apologia pro Mente Sua"-was published as volume two of Northwestern University Press's Library of Living Philosophers. In 1939, when war broke out in Europe and Swiss authorities denied him a long-term visa, Santayana decided to stay in Italy, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. The letters in this book are written to such correspondents as Van Meter Ames, Curt John Ducasse, Max Forrester Eastman, Max Fisch, Sidney Hook, Horace Meyer Kallen, Christopher Janus, Milton Munitz, William Lyon Phelps, and Ezra Pound, and include discussions of the work of Henri Bergson, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, among others.