High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel was written by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. The novel is set largely in the fictional town of Great Falls, Connecticut; Boston; and England, in and around Oxford. It relates the life of Oliver Alden, the descendant of an old Boston family. Santayana wrote of the novel that "it gives the emotions of my experiences, and not my thoughts or experiences themselves."