Samuel Butler was an English novelist, essayist, critic, translator, and intellectual provocateur whose work ranged across fiction, satire, theology, evolutionary theory, art criticism, and classical literature. Born in 1835, Butler was educated at Cambridge and spent several formative years in New Zealand before returning to England and establishing himself as one of the most original independent writers of the late Victorian period. His fiction often used irony, inversion, and speculative settings to expose the contradictions of respectable society, organised religion, inherited doctrine, and unexamined moral convention.Butler is best remembered for Erewhon, his satirical novel of an imaginary country whose customs reverse many assumptions of Victorian life, and for The Way of All Flesh, his posthumously published critique of family, religion, and social conformity. In Erewhon Revisited, he returned to his most famous fictional world with a more direct attack on institutional religion and the making of public myth. His work remains important to readers of Victorian literature, satire, philosophical fiction, early speculative fiction, utopian fiction, and the tradition of dissenting English prose.
