The Way of All Flesh (Thrift Editions) - Softcover

Butler, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486434664 ISBN 13: 9780486434667

Publisher: Dover Publications Inc., 2004

Synopsis

Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical family's domestic life. It also foreshadows the crumbling of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals in the aftermath of the First World War, as well as the ways in which succeeding generations have questioned conventional values.
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," this chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex spans four generations, focusing chiefly on the relationship between Ernest and his father, Theobald. Written in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, it reflects the dawning consciousness of heredity and environment as determinants of character. Along the way, it offers a powerfully satirical indictment of Victorian England's major institutions—the family, the church, and the rigidly hierarchical class structure.

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: Dover Publications Inc.
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0486434664
• ISBN 13: 9780486434667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320