To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 18, 1936
Apparently The Last Puritan continued to be the best-seller until April 5th when (according to Bob Barlow) my “score had again gone up to 70, Sinclair Lewis’s had dropped to 38.” I don’t know what those figures stand for, but evidently it means large sales. 135,000 is the last figure reported to me by Scribner. People ask, and I ask, What is the reason? Perhaps it is that some people like the book because they understand it, and others like it because they don’t understand it.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA