Will Durant's history of civilisation began as church lectures paid five dollars
To support his new wife, a former trainee priest turned radical schoolteacher gave talks in a Presbyterian church for 5 or 10 dollars a night. Those lectures grew into The Story of Civilization, eleven volumes written with Ariel Durant over four decades, which won a Pulitzer Prize and sold in enormous numbers.
William James Durant was born on November 5, 1885, in North Adams, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian Catholic parents. His mother hoped he would become a priest, and he trained toward it before drifting into socialism around 1905. He taught Latin and French at Seton Hall, then worked at the Ferrer Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education, until marrying Ariel Kaufman in 1913. His attachment to Spinoza and to self-discipline left him cool toward anarchist calls to simply be yourself.
The breakthrough was The Story of Philosophy. It started as a run of Little Blue Books, cheap educational pamphlets for workers, and proved so popular that Simon & Schuster reissued it as a hardback in 1926. It became a bestseller and bought the couple the freedom to travel the world repeatedly and devote forty years to their great project. Durant borrowed a phrase from Spinoza to describe philosophy as seeing things from the perspective of the whole.
The Durants called their method integral history: not only wars and rulers but art, religion, science and the daily lives of ordinary people across some 2500 years of Western history. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and in 1977 Gerald Ford gave each of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Scholars were less kind; Moses Finley criticised his volume on Greece for racial essentialism and great-man history. Notes for volumes on Darwin and Einstein were left unfinished.
Durant had causes beyond history. A 1930 trip to India so shocked him that he paused his research to write The Case for India, attacking British rule. In 1944 he proposed a Declaration of Interdependence against racial intolerance, launched at a 1945 dinner attended by Thomas Mann and Bette Davis. When he was hospitalised in 1981, Ariel stopped eating and died on October 25. The family tried to hide it, but he learned the news from the television and died on November 7, two days after turning 96.
Source: Will Durant
