|
Born Jorge Agustín
Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana, he spent his early childhood in Ávila,
Spain. His father was a diplomat, painter, and minor
intellectual. His mother was the daughter of a Spanish
official in the Philippine Islands. Jorge was the only child
of his mother's second marriage. She was the widow of George
Sturgis, a Boston merchant by whom she had five children, two of
whom died in infancy. She lived in Boston following her
husband's death in 1857, but in 1861 went with her three surviving
Sturgis children to live in Madrid. There she again
encountered Agustin Santayana, an old friend from her years in the
Philippines and married him in 1862. The family lived in
Madrid and Avila until 1869 when Santayana's mother returned to
Boston with her three Sturgis children, leaving Jorge, then five,
with his father in Spain. Jorge and his father followed her in
1872, but his father, not finding Boston to his liking, soon
returned alone to Ávila, where he remained for the rest of his
life. Jorge did not see his father again until summer
vacations while he was a student at Harvard. Hence from the
time he was five, Jorge's parents lived apart. Sometime during
this period Jorge americanized his name to George, its English
equivalent.
He attended Boston
Latin School and Harvard University, studying under William James
and Josiah Royce, whose colleague he subsequently became. After
graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied for two years in Berlin,
then returned to Harvard to write a thesis on Rudolf Hermann Lotze
and teach philosophy, thus becoming part of the Golden Age of
Harvard philosophy. Some of his Harvard students became famous
in their own right, including T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace
Stevens, Walter Lippmann, and Harry Austryn Wolfson.
In 1912, an
inheritance from his mother allowed him to retire from Harvard and
spend the rest of his life in Europe. After some years in
Paris and Oxford, he began to winter in Rome starting in 1920,
eventually living there year-round until his death in 1952. During
his 40 years in Europe, he wrote 19 books and declined several
prestigious academic positions. Most of his friends and
correspondents were Americans, including his valuable assistant and
eventual literary executor, Daniel Cory. The aged Santayana
was comfortable, in part because his 1935 novelized memoir, The
Last Puritan, sold well. In turn, he assisted financially
a number of writers including Bertrand Russell, with whom he was in
fundamental disagreement, philosophically and politically.
Santayana never married.
--from Wikipedia |
