Will Durant / Will and Ariel Durant

Will Durant was the most widely read historian of the twentieth century — a man who spent fifty years of his life writing an eleven-volume history of world civilisation that traced the story of human culture from the earliest societies of the ancient East to the age of Napoleon, producing in the process a work of approximately four million words that was read by millions of people on every continent and that represented, for better or worse, the last great attempt by a single author (or, in the later volumes, a married couple) to tell the entire story of Western civilisation in a single continuous narrative. The ambition was staggering, the achievement imperfect but remarkable, and the readership enormous: The Story of Civilization sold over two million sets and made the Durants wealthy, famous, and, among professional historians, controversial.

From Seminary to Socialism

William James Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 1885, the son of French-Canadian immigrants. He was educated at a Jesuit school and briefly entered a seminary before losing his faith and turning to socialism — he taught at the anarchist Ferrer Modern School in New York, where he met his future wife, a fourteen-year-old student named Chaya Kaufman, who later took the name Ariel. They married in 1913 (he was twenty-eight; she was fifteen — a fact that has attracted increasing scrutiny in recent decades) and remained married for sixty-eight years, dying within two weeks of each other in 1981.

Durant began his career as a popular lecturer at the Labor Temple in New York, where his evening classes on philosophy and history drew large working-class audiences. His lectures on philosophy were published as The Story of Philosophy (1926), which became an immediate and enormous bestseller — it sold over two million copies and remains one of the most popular introductions to philosophy ever written. The book’s success gave Durant the financial freedom to undertake the vast historical project that would occupy the rest of his life.

The Story of Civilization

The Story of Civilization was published in eleven volumes between 1935 and 1975:

1. Our Oriental Heritage (1935) — the civilisations of Egypt, the Near East, India, China, and Japan
2. The Life of Greece (1939) — Greek civilisation from its origins to the Roman conquest
3. Caesar and Christ (1944) — Rome and the rise of Christianity
4. The Age of Faith (1950) — the Middle Ages, including Islamic and Byzantine civilisation
5. The Renaissance (1953) — Italy from Petrarch to the sack of Rome
6. The Reformation (1957) — the sixteenth century, Luther to Elizabeth
7. The Age of Reason Begins (1961) — the seventeenth century (first volume co-authored with Ariel)
8. The Age of Louis XIV (1963) — France and Europe under the Sun King
9. The Age of Voltaire (1965) — the first half of the eighteenth century
10. Rousseau and Revolution (1967, Pulitzer Prize) — the second half of the eighteenth century
11. The Age of Napoleon (1975) — the French Revolution and Napoleon

The series was popular history in the grandest tradition — readable, entertaining, opinionated, and immensely learned, if not always reliable in its scholarship. Durant wrote in a flowing, epigrammatic style that made complex historical material accessible to general readers. His gift for the memorable phrase was remarkable: “Civilisation is not inherited; it must be learned and earned by each generation anew.” “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

Ariel Durant

Ariel Durant’s contribution to the later volumes was substantial and has been underappreciated. She conducted much of the research for volumes seven through eleven, wrote sections on social and cultural history, and provided a critical perspective that balanced Will’s tendency toward sweeping generalisation. The Pulitzer Prize for Rousseau and Revolution was awarded jointly to both authors.

Their short book The Lessons of History (1968) — a hundred-page distillation of the patterns they had observed across ten thousand years of civilisation — has become one of their most widely read works, a favourite of business leaders and politicians seeking historical perspective.

Critical Reception

Professional historians have always been ambivalent about Durant. The scope of The Story of Civilization was admired; the execution was criticized for relying too heavily on secondary sources, for oversimplifying complex historical debates, for focusing excessively on political and intellectual elites at the expense of economic and social structures, and for the inevitable errors that accumulate in a work of four million words written by two people rather than a team of specialists. Durant was, in the eyes of the academy, a populariser rather than a scholar.

The criticism was partly justified and partly beside the point. Durant never pretended to be writing for specialists. He was writing for the general reader who wanted to understand the arc of human civilisation, and for that reader, his work was — and remains — genuinely useful.

Collecting Durant

The Story of Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1926) in first edition with dust jacket is an important book. The eleven-volume Story of Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 1935–1975) is collected as a complete set; individual volumes in first edition with dust jackets are also sought. Rousseau and Revolution (1967), the Pulitzer Prize winner, is the most collected individual volume. The Lessons of History (Simon and Schuster, 1968) is widely available. Signed copies exist and are valued, particularly when inscribed by both Will and Ariel.