Samuel Putnam Quote

The pretense, the fiction (for it is scarcely more than that) of an attack on the books of chivalry is kept up throughout; but as the story develops and deepens beyond the author's expectations as well as those of the reader, Don Quixote becomes nothing less than a novelistic treatment of the essential nature of human life and man's greatest metaphysical problem: that of illusion and reality. It is a problem as old as Plato-and a good deal older- and as new as Jean-Paul Sartre. It is one that, as Lionel Trilling has rightly observed, has always been the serious novelist's chief concern. In this light, there can no longer be any question as to Don Quixote's madness in the ordinary acceptation of that term. In Waldo Frank's finely expressive phrase, he is a man possessed, not a madman.

Samuel Putnam

The pretense, the fiction (for it is scarcely more than that) of an attack on the books of chivalry is kept up throughout; but as the story develops and deepens beyond the author's expectations as well as those of the reader, Don Quixote becomes nothing less than a novelistic treatment of the essential nature of human life and man's greatest metaphysical problem: that of illusion and reality. It is a problem as old as Plato-and a good deal older- and as new as Jean-Paul Sartre. It is one that, as Lionel Trilling has rightly observed, has always been the serious novelist's chief concern. In this light, there can no longer be any question as to Don Quixote's madness in the ordinary acceptation of that term. In Waldo Frank's finely expressive phrase, he is a man possessed, not a madman.

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About Samuel Putnam

Samuel Putnam (October 10, 1892 – January 15, 1950) was an American translator and scholar of Romance languages. He authored Paris Was Our Mistress, a memoir on writers and artists associated with the American ex-patriate community in Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s.