To Otto Kyllmann
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 7, 1935
At last yesterday I sent off the MS of The Last Puritan which I hope you will receive safely. . . . We have tried to polish it and make it as inoffensive as possible, without weakening the picturesque or the moral burden of it: but it has to be “burdened”; “burdened” was a favourite word with my old teacher Josiah Royce at Harvard: it signified all the inescapable oppression, nervous and imaginative, from which he and his people suffered. Cory thinks that the last part of the book is “inevitable”, and has dramatic interest. I see myself that it reads more like other novels than does the body of the story, but I haven’t attempted to practice “the art of fiction” according to Percy Lubbock or any other critic, but to write a documentary biography of an imaginary superior American, as it might be if distilled into its quintessence and expressed with complete frankness.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA.