The Way of All Flesh - Softcover

Butler, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1434456587 ISBN 13: 9781434456588

Publisher: Wildside Press, 2025

Synopsis

Ernest Pontifex is born into a deeply religious Victorian family where obedience is demanded and individuality suppressed. As he grows, he confronts the crushing expectations of his parents, religious dogma, and the rigid values of society—ultimately seeking his own path through a maze of personal failure and philosophical awakening. The Way of All Flesh is a powerful, semi-autobiographical critique of Victorian morality, tracing one man’s painful journey toward self-realization in a world built to deny it.

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 (4 or 5 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1434456587
• ISBN 13: 9781434456588
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 377