British · 1835–1902
Samuel Butler attacked Victorian pieties with satirical intelligence. Erewhon imagined a society that treated illness as crime and crime as illness, inverting English assumptions. The Way of All Flesh, published after his death, traced four generations of a family with autobiographical bitterness, demolishing the myth of Victorian domestic harmony. Butler quarreled with Darwin over evolution, championed Lamarck, and proposed theories about the authorship of the Odyssey. His notebooks, published posthumously, revealed an aphorist of persistent originality. Butler influenced Shaw, who championed his work, and through Shaw, much of twentieth-century skepticism toward received ideas.