Way of All Flesh (Signet Classical Books) - Softcover

Butler, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451001753 ISBN 13: 9780451001757

Publisher: New American Library, 1950

Synopsis

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in its chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex. Along the way, it offers a powerful indictment of 19th-century England's major institutions.

About this title

Review

It is read, I believe, mostly by the young, bent on making out a case against their elders, but Butler was fifty when he stopped working on it, and no reader much under that age is likely to appreciate the full beauty of its horrors. . . . Every contemporary novelist with a developed sense of irony is probably in some measure, directly or indirectly, indebted to Butler, who had the misfortune to be a twentieth-century man born in the year 1835 --The New Yorker

About the Author

SAMUEL BUTLER (1835-1902), the freethinking iconoclast whom George Bernard Shaw deemed the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century, also satirized Victorian society in Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). His work strongly influenced such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce.

Edition details

• Publisher: New American Library
• Publication date: 1950
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451001753
• ISBN 13: 9780451001757
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384