Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel and it became an instant best seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. Oliver escapes puritanical self-destruction, the inability to celebrate life, through a form of self-knowledge that Santayana endorses throughout his moral philosophy.