The Private World

Illuminating selections from Unamuno’s diary and letters that chronicle his profound religious, social, and political evolution

These selections from the diary and letters of Miguel de Unamuno are deeply personal and compelling expressions of the spiritual life of the great Spanish writer and philosopher. The Intimate Diary of his religious crisis of 1897 records the rekindling of a faith abandoned during his university years. Confronted by the illness of one of his children, he underwent a period of agony at the end of which he accepted the necessity of grappling with the central issue of his subsequent work: the existence of God and the fate of man after death. The selected letters are an account not only of the upheavals of Unamuno’s spiritual life but of his reactions to the shocks of history, revealing a spirit in almost constant turmoil—his passionate struggle to understand himself as writer, homo religiosus, political being, university professor and rector, and husband and father. Both sections of the book reflect not only his spiritual life but his richly stocked mind. He read widely in the Iberian languages and in all the major languages of Western Europe.