Samuel Butler (novelist)

Samuel Butler ( born December 4, 1835 in Langar, Nottinghamshire, † June 18, 1902 in London) was a British writer, composer, scholar, painter and scholar.

Life

Butler studied at Cambridge and emigrated in 1859, after a quarrel with his father to New Zealand, where he raised sheep. In 1864 he returned to England and lived there until his death in Clifford 's Inn, close to London's Fleet Street. He died in 1902 in London.

Work

Butler dealt among other things with the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. End of the 19th century, he exposed in his satirical novel " Erewhon " the religious and social hypocrisy of his contemporaries as a topsy-turvy world. He remained in many ways an outsider, even in its rejection of the unbroken belief in progress of the Victorian age. Butler was often compared to Swift, and had particularly on Somerset Maugham, DH Lawrence, HG Wells and James Joyce big impact. His initial admiration for Darwin was followed by a subsequent distancing; at the same time he approached again in later years of the Church, whose orthodoxy, however, he criticized same time. He is known primarily for his Journals, in which he often wore together funny and critical aphorisms.

" All living things except the people know that the main purpose of life is to enjoy it. "

Works

• Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont
• Darwin among the Machines (1863 )
• The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler ( biography of his grandfather, an English scholar )
• Erewhon (1872 German Ergindwon or beyond the mountains 1879)
• Erewon Revisited (1901 )
• The Way of All Flesh (1903, posthumous ) German: The way of all flesh. Novel, transferred from the English and annotated by Helmut Findeisen. Classical dtv, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-02240- X.