In an article titled "Who Is Santayana?" published in the Saturday Review of Literature in January 1956, Charles Frankel wrote, "I am inclined to believe that what happens to Santayana's reputation will be the touchstone of the quality of our culture, and of our growth in maturity and wisdom." That George Santayana, Spanish by birth and passport, American "in practice" as a writer and teacher, and resident of Italy during the final twenty-eight years of his life, could inspire such a quote, along with poems of tribute from Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, indicates that he was a man of letters of enormous stature. He is known as a philosopher, but in essence he was a little of everything in the writing trade, an ascetic man who resisted a move by one man to nominate him for a Nobel Prize by asking, "In what science or...