In turn, he assisted financially a number of writers including Bertrand Russell, with whom he was in fundamental disagreement, philosophically and politically. The aged Santayana was comfortable, in part because his 1935 novelized memoir, The Last Puritan, sold well. Most of his friends and correspondents were Americans, including his valuable assistant and eventual literary executor, Daniel Cory. During his 40 years in Europe, he wrote 19 books and declined several prestigious academic positions. After some years in Paris and Oxford, he began to winter in Rome starting in 1920, eventually living there year-round until his death in 1952. In 1912, an inheritance from his mother allowed him to retire from Harvard and spend the rest of his life in Europe. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Walter Lippmann, and Harry Austryn Wolfson. Some of his Harvard students became famous in their own right, including T. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied for two years in Berlin, then returned to Harvard to write a thesis on Rudolf Hermann Lotze and teach philosophy, thus becoming part of the Golden Age of Harvard philosophy. He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University, studying under William James and Josiah Royce, whose colleague he subsequently became. Sometime during this period Jorge americanized his name to George, its English equivalent. Hence from the time he was five, Jorge's parents lived apart. Jorge did not see his father again until summer vacations while he was a student at Harvard. Jorge and his father followed her in 1872, but his father, not finding Boston to his liking, soon returned alone to Ávila, where he remained for the rest of his life. The family lived in Madrid and Ávila until 1869 when Santayana's mother returned to Boston with her three Sturgis children, leaving Jorge, then five, with his father in Spain. There she again encountered Agustin Santayana, an old friend from her years in the Philippines and married him in 1862. She lived in Boston following her husband's death in 1857, but in 1861 went with her three surviving Sturgis children to live in Madrid. She was the widow of George Sturgis, a Boston merchant by whom she had five children, two of whom died in infancy. Jorge was the only child of his mother's second marriage. His mother was the daughter of a Spanish official in the Philippine Islands. His father was a diplomat, painter, and minor intellectual. Born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana, he spent his early childhood in Ávila, Spain.