Samuel Butler
English novelist of the utopian satire Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, an attack on Victorian morality Show bio
Bio
Samuel Butler could recall no time when he did not fear and dislike his father. He trained for the clergy until he found that baptism seemed to change no one's behavior. Butler met his father's anger over those doubts by emigrating to New Zealand.
He raised sheep there and drafted much of Erewhon, the novel that later made his name. Butler published it anonymously, and the guessing over its author made him well known.
He put his childhood into The Way of All Flesh, then withheld it as too contentious. Butler never lived to see his portrait of the father he feared in print.