What do you think?
Rate this book
Persons and Places
Philosopher, poet, critic of culture and literature, and best-selling novelist, George Santayana (1863-1952) stands as a major figure in American philosophy and literature. This new edition of his autobiography restores passages that were deleted in the original book because of the publisher's sensitivities about lawsuits, printing and production convenience, a general desire by editors to "soften" some of his remarks, and his own request that portions be published only after his death.Santayana's marginal notes, idiosyncratic punctuation, and use of British spelling, reveal a stubbornly aloof and scrupulously remote observer. The eloquence of this detachment is fully brought forth in the rich language and smoothly ironic recollections of "Persons and Places."William G. Holzberger is Professor of English at Bucknell University. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. is Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Texas A&M University.
761 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1944
2 people are currently reading
394 people want to read
About the author
George Santayana
425 books339 followersPhilosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats's memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 19, 2025
Santayana is wonderful – an elitist, Latin, idiosyncratically Catholic crypto-homosexual whose prose style makes me think of Gibbon cut with Yourcenar. He belongs in Cyril Connolly’s select pantheon, among the aphorists and philosophic poets who combine a “sense of perfection and a faith in human dignity” with a “tragic apprehending of the human condition, and its nearness to the Abyss.”
I love his writing because in it materialism and idealism, human limitation and human transcendence, appear in proportions I find congenial, sane, and frequently wise. He seems to recall older meanings of “philosopher”: that of the ancient polis (Bertrand Russell attributed William James’ constitutional antipathy for his Harvard colleague Santayana to a “democratic feeling” that made James “unable to acquiesce in the notion of one truth for the philosophers and another for the vulgar”); and that of the eighteenth century, as he exposes the material basis and conditions of our ideals and religions – while always aware that ideals and religions, in various forms, are all we have; are the flawed and falsified substance – essence? I don’t know these terms – of our being; and are, finally, beautiful.
I should stop summarizing Santayana because I’ve only read this, the first volume of his memoirs, and little more than half of an abridgement of his four-volume magnum opus, The Life of Reason — enough, though, to sense the justice of (former student) Wallace Stevens’ elegy, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”:
And Robert Lowell’s tribute seems to capture Santayana’s idiosyncratic aesthete’s Catholicism:
This review has become a tissue of quotations because it is the fate of neglected writers to cut a figure only in the still-in-print writings of their better remembered contemporaries, disciples and admirers.
I see that the 1944 first edition of Persons and Places that I read – surprisingly sturdy and well-made for a book issued under wartime rationing – saw the light shorn of many passages. The US State Department and the Vatican worked to smuggle the manuscript out of Axis Rome, where Santayana was living in a convent of Irish nuns, and passed it to Scribner’s, whose editors felt an anxiety to “soften” some of Santayana’s remarks, especially those about his prominent Boston relations. Still, there was enough satirical sharpness left over to make the genealogical chapters unusually memorable.
The story of how Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás came to be a Bostonian is a fascinating one. His Spanish maternal grandfather took his mother to America in the 1820s. They spent many years in Virginia – Santayana noted his mother’s Southern idiom of English, “oh come step in” for “you may have this dance” – until Andrew Jackson appointed the grandfather American consul at Barcelona. With the end of Jackson's second term the office lapsed and grandfather took a posting with Spain’s colonial service, and he and his now teenage daughter sailed for the Philippines, for Batang, an island on which they were the only Europeans, even the priest being native. Grandfather soon took sick and died. To support herself Mother became something of a merchant, convincing passing ships to transport the island’s hemp harvest to Manila’s market. After a while a replacement governor arrived – the man who would be Santayana’s father. But there was no island romance, no palm-shaded tropical betrothal. It was thought unseemly for an unchaperoned young lady to live alone alongside a man (I guess the natives didn’t count?), and Mother immediately departed for Manila, where she met and married George Russell, a Boston merchant in the China trade and, interesting to me, one of Robert Gould Shaw’s uncles. She bore him three children. He died in 1857 and she returned to Boston. Visiting Spain a little later, she again met Santayana’s father. They married, and lived in Boston until the outbreak of the American Civil War, when she insisted on returning to Spain. There Jorge/George was born in 1864. Mother, with the children from her first marriage, retuned to Boston in 1869; her husband followed with young George in 1872 but Father disliked Boston and sailed back the same year, alone and for good. Jorge/George was raised in shabby gentility, in respectable but cheerless neighborhoods. The book ends with his graduation from Harvard and embarkation for Germany.
I like this passage:
Telling me to read Mishima?
I love his writing because in it materialism and idealism, human limitation and human transcendence, appear in proportions I find congenial, sane, and frequently wise. He seems to recall older meanings of “philosopher”: that of the ancient polis (Bertrand Russell attributed William James’ constitutional antipathy for his Harvard colleague Santayana to a “democratic feeling” that made James “unable to acquiesce in the notion of one truth for the philosophers and another for the vulgar”); and that of the eighteenth century, as he exposes the material basis and conditions of our ideals and religions – while always aware that ideals and religions, in various forms, are all we have; are the flawed and falsified substance – essence? I don’t know these terms – of our being; and are, finally, beautiful.
I should stop summarizing Santayana because I’ve only read this, the first volume of his memoirs, and little more than half of an abridgement of his four-volume magnum opus, The Life of Reason — enough, though, to sense the justice of (former student) Wallace Stevens’ elegy, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”:
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood…
And Robert Lowell’s tribute seems to capture Santayana’s idiosyncratic aesthete’s Catholicism:
…free-thinking Catholic infidel,
stray spirit, who’d found
the Church too good to be believed.
This review has become a tissue of quotations because it is the fate of neglected writers to cut a figure only in the still-in-print writings of their better remembered contemporaries, disciples and admirers.
I see that the 1944 first edition of Persons and Places that I read – surprisingly sturdy and well-made for a book issued under wartime rationing – saw the light shorn of many passages. The US State Department and the Vatican worked to smuggle the manuscript out of Axis Rome, where Santayana was living in a convent of Irish nuns, and passed it to Scribner’s, whose editors felt an anxiety to “soften” some of Santayana’s remarks, especially those about his prominent Boston relations. Still, there was enough satirical sharpness left over to make the genealogical chapters unusually memorable.
The story of how Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás came to be a Bostonian is a fascinating one. His Spanish maternal grandfather took his mother to America in the 1820s. They spent many years in Virginia – Santayana noted his mother’s Southern idiom of English, “oh come step in” for “you may have this dance” – until Andrew Jackson appointed the grandfather American consul at Barcelona. With the end of Jackson's second term the office lapsed and grandfather took a posting with Spain’s colonial service, and he and his now teenage daughter sailed for the Philippines, for Batang, an island on which they were the only Europeans, even the priest being native. Grandfather soon took sick and died. To support herself Mother became something of a merchant, convincing passing ships to transport the island’s hemp harvest to Manila’s market. After a while a replacement governor arrived – the man who would be Santayana’s father. But there was no island romance, no palm-shaded tropical betrothal. It was thought unseemly for an unchaperoned young lady to live alone alongside a man (I guess the natives didn’t count?), and Mother immediately departed for Manila, where she met and married George Russell, a Boston merchant in the China trade and, interesting to me, one of Robert Gould Shaw’s uncles. She bore him three children. He died in 1857 and she returned to Boston. Visiting Spain a little later, she again met Santayana’s father. They married, and lived in Boston until the outbreak of the American Civil War, when she insisted on returning to Spain. There Jorge/George was born in 1864. Mother, with the children from her first marriage, retuned to Boston in 1869; her husband followed with young George in 1872 but Father disliked Boston and sailed back the same year, alone and for good. Jorge/George was raised in shabby gentility, in respectable but cheerless neighborhoods. The book ends with his graduation from Harvard and embarkation for Germany.
I like this passage:
Between the laughing and the weeping philosopher there is no opposition: the same facts that make one laugh make one weep. No whole-hearted man, no sane art, can be limited to either mood. In me this combination seems to be readier and more pervasive than in most people. I laugh a great deal, laugh too much, my friends tell me; and those who don’t understand me think that this merriment contradicts my disillusioned philosophy. They, apparently, would never laugh if they admitted that life is a dream, that men are animated automata, and that the forms of the good and beautiful are as various and evanescent as the natural harmonies that produce them. They think they would collapse or turn to stone, or despair and commit suicide. But probably they would do no such thing: they would adapt themselves to the reality, and laugh. They might even feel a new zest in living, join in some bold adventure, become heroes, and think it glorious to die with a smile for the love of something beautiful. They do not perceive that this is exactly what national leaders and religious martyrs have always done, except that their warm imagination has probably deceived them about the material effects of what they were doing.
Telling me to read Mishima?
May 16, 2016
More than once in my life I have crossed a desert in all that regards myself, my thoughts, or my happiness; so that when I look back over those years, I see objects, I see public events, I see persons and places, but I don’t see myself.
Santayana was an intensely private man. He is aloofness personified, an exemplar of the wandering sage. So when you read his works of philosophy, you get the feeling that there is something being hidden, like a card tucked up his sleeve. Who was this man, so totally unattached, and yet so connected to the intellectual life of his times? How was someone like Santayana—who sounds alternately like a prophet and an anachronism—born into the same time as Bertrand Russell and William James? Who was he?
These questions in mind, I quite naturally turned to his memoirs. Perhaps here I would find the answer? Alas, no; for the privacy that characterizes his philosophical writing also makes itself apparent here, in his recollections. This book is not a confession, nor is it even a narrative of his life. It is, rather, as the title suggests, a series of portraits and vignettes from his memory. It is an attempt to set down in writing some of the places and people who meant the most to him, and to evoke them, as best he can, for the reader.
I must admit that I was a bit disappointed in this. When I read the memoirs of a thinker or a writer, I hope to find reflections on the development of his ideas, the beginnings of his interests, the techniques of his working life. But this book is not one about ideas; it is not even a book of anecdotes: “Ghastly are those autobiographies that contain nothing but old jokes and old anecdotes,” he says, and launches into another description. Instead of either ideas or adventures, instead of any coming-of-age story, we encounter Santayana’s usual perfect calmness, his triumphant repose. One gets the impression that Santayana was never excited or flustered in his life, so staid does he seem.
Of course, it’s still an enjoyable read. Santayana is always a strong writer, and the quality of his writing here far exceeds that in his novel, The Last Puritan. Plus, it’s simply fascinating seeing the world through his eyes. For one, the details of his life were peculiar; he had a unique upbringing, and he was teaching during the Golden Age of Harvard. He met some of the brightest minds of his day, and traveled about America and Europe during and between the two world wars. Yet these memoirs are perhaps more valuable for their perspective than their details. Santayana doesn’t philosophize in this book, but he has the perspective of a philosopher; he looks on life with a calm—some would say a cold—gaze. He was determined to live his life as he chose it, totally free and unaffiliated, seeing and thinking in private. He may not have wanted to get too close to us, but at least he has given us this book.
July 19, 2023
THE Santayana's autobiography. And it's GEORGE, anglicized from Jorge; he was named after his mother's first husband, Bostonian George Sturgis. The most interesting part of this book is at the beginning, where he maps out his family's origins. An extremely interesting first 50 pages for me. Who knew about Santayana's Philippine (under Spain) connection? Granted, he never set foot here, but his parents met here. (Considering his curiosity for history, he should have.)
So I don't forget: Owing to his maternal grandfather's offer of a governorship in Batang Island (nobody seems to know where this is, but it must be Batanes, since hemp figures in the story), his mother, an only child, and her father are stationed there. The father soon dies, leaving his mother an orphan. She stays on the island, and trades hemp to Manila. Not soon after, Agustín Ruiz de Santayana takes her father's place as governor. For propriety's sake, and because both his mother and the governor are the only white people in an island of "Indians," his mother is compelled to leave the island and stay in Manila with friends. In Manila she meets American George Sturgis and marries him and proceed to have five kids, two of whom would die in infancy. Then Mr. Sturgis meets an untimely death. While visiting Spain, his mother meets Señor Agustín Ruiz de Santayana. Again. The same fellow she had to leave Batang Island for. George Santayana insists there would have been no sparks of passion between his parents, and he cannot account for the attraction, more so their inclination to marry.
The second half of the book deals with his life in Boston and his first visit to the Avila of his childhood. Since I haven't read The Last Puritan, I cannot really appreciate nor relate to the friends whom he intimates were his bases for the book's characters. This book's success was second only to Gone With the Wind at the time of its release, so it must have been pretty mainstream reading.
Overall, this was not the "intellectual epicure's" book I thought it would be. Santayana's musings on religion and faith, friendship and family, education and success--these were all laid out in a most conversational manner. Nothing verbose, if I managed to grasp most of it. But he's sketchy with dates (this he admits), and for someone who's always being quoted, this one had so few quotes that caught my fancy. For this maybe I should look to his essays?
So I don't forget: Owing to his maternal grandfather's offer of a governorship in Batang Island (nobody seems to know where this is, but it must be Batanes, since hemp figures in the story), his mother, an only child, and her father are stationed there. The father soon dies, leaving his mother an orphan. She stays on the island, and trades hemp to Manila. Not soon after, Agustín Ruiz de Santayana takes her father's place as governor. For propriety's sake, and because both his mother and the governor are the only white people in an island of "Indians," his mother is compelled to leave the island and stay in Manila with friends. In Manila she meets American George Sturgis and marries him and proceed to have five kids, two of whom would die in infancy. Then Mr. Sturgis meets an untimely death. While visiting Spain, his mother meets Señor Agustín Ruiz de Santayana. Again. The same fellow she had to leave Batang Island for. George Santayana insists there would have been no sparks of passion between his parents, and he cannot account for the attraction, more so their inclination to marry.
The second half of the book deals with his life in Boston and his first visit to the Avila of his childhood. Since I haven't read The Last Puritan, I cannot really appreciate nor relate to the friends whom he intimates were his bases for the book's characters. This book's success was second only to Gone With the Wind at the time of its release, so it must have been pretty mainstream reading.
Overall, this was not the "intellectual epicure's" book I thought it would be. Santayana's musings on religion and faith, friendship and family, education and success--these were all laid out in a most conversational manner. Nothing verbose, if I managed to grasp most of it. But he's sketchy with dates (this he admits), and for someone who's always being quoted, this one had so few quotes that caught my fancy. For this maybe I should look to his essays?
August 24, 2022
The book honors its title. Santayana does a wonderful job capturing the impressions that different persons made on him at the successive stages of his life. While peppered with brilliant passages and observations, the book can became tedious. In my case I am not familiar with 1800s Boston society and I am unable to appreciate many of the nuances.
December 29, 2017
Como mucha gente en España, descubri a Santayana a traves de Fernando Sabater
August 7, 2015
Terrific!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews