The Way of All Flesh

The Way of All Flesh is a novel by the English writer Samuel Butler, written between 1873 and 1884 and published in 1903, a year after his death.

The book traces four generations of the Pontifex family, from a village craftsman who makes money and a place in the church to the grandchildren who inherit both. Ernest Pontifex is the generation the novel spends most of its time with: he is the son of a clergyman who cannot see him clearly, sent into the church himself, and required to live by a version of respectability that his own experience keeps contradicting. Butler wrote the novel as a semi-autobiographical book and as an attack on the hypocrisy of Victorian life, and he left it unpublished because he did not want to face the people in it. The title comes from a phrase in the Bible.

Butler's first literary executor changed the manuscript substantially before publication, and the text as the author wrote it was not published until 1964, more than thirty years after the first edition.