Will Durant: The Historian Who Wrote for Everyone
In 1926 a former Jersey City schoolteacher published a book that explained the entire Western philosophical tradition in language a factory worker could follow. *The Story of Philosophy* sold in numbers that startled its publisher and made its author financially independent for the rest of his life — which he then spent, across half a century and eleven volumes, attempting the same trick with the whole of human civilization. Academic historians were often unimpressed. Several million readers were not.
Quebec to New Jersey
Will Durant was born on 5 November 1885 in North Adams, Massachusetts, to Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, French-Canadian Catholics who had emigrated from Quebec. His schooling was Catholic and local: St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, from which he graduated in 1903, and then Saint Peter's College in the same city, graduating in 1907.
He went straight into teaching, taking a post instructing Latin and French at Seton Hall College, where he remained until 1911. In 1908 he also worked briefly as a reporter for the *New York Evening Journal* — a short apprenticeship in writing for a mass audience that would prove more useful to him than most of his formal education.
The Radical Years
Between 1911 and 1913 Durant taught at the Ferrer Modern School in New York, an institution founded on anarchist and libertarian educational principles — a considerable distance from Seton Hall. In 1913 he married Ariel Kaufman, then fifteen years old, in what would become one of the great intellectual partnerships of American letters. They had a daughter, Ethel, and raised a foster son, Louis, the child of Ariel's sister Flora.
From 1914 to 1927 Durant directed and lectured at the Labor Temple School in New York City, teaching philosophy and history to working adults. This was the crucible. Fourteen years of explaining Plato and Spinoza to audiences with no university training taught him the skill that would define his career: how to make difficult ideas comprehensible without making them stupid.
Meanwhile he completed his own credentials, taking a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1917 and serving that year as an instructor in philosophy there. He also published his first book, *Philosophy and the Social Problem*.
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*The Story of Philosophy* began as a series of educational pamphlets, written in the same spirit as the Labor Temple lectures. Simon & Schuster republished them as a single hardcover in 1926, and the result became one of the publishing phenomena of the interwar period. It presented philosophy as a sequence of human lives and arguments rather than a technical apparatus — biography as the entry point to abstraction.
The money it generated bought Durant something rare: decades of unsupervised writing time. He never had to hold an academic post again, and he never did.
Eleven Volumes, Forty Years
What he did with that freedom was *The Story of Civilization*, eleven volumes published between 1935 and 1975, co-authored with Ariel Durant — who was, for many years, credited less generously than the work warranted before her name appeared alongside his on the covers.
The project's governing idea was what Durant called integral history. Conventional history narrated wars, dynasties and treaties. Integral history insisted that a civilization is equally its art, its philosophy, its religion, its science and the texture of ordinary daily life, and that these cannot be understood apart from one another. The Durants applied this across roughly twenty-five centuries and across both Eastern and Western civilizations — a scope that professional historians, increasingly specialized, had largely abandoned as impossible.
In 1968 the volume *Rousseau and Revolution* won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The American Academy of Achievement gave them its Golden Plate Award in 1976, and in 1977 President Gerald Ford presented both Durants with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What He Came to Believe
Durant's politics travelled a long arc. He held socialist sympathies as a young man in 1905; after the First World War he arrived at a bleaker reading of political behaviour, seeing beneath it "a lust for power" that no ideology dissolved. It was the conclusion of someone who had read too much history to remain confident about any single remedy.
He did not become a quietist. He argued forcefully against racial intolerance, and in 1945 he initiated the Declaration of Interdependence movement — an explicit attempt, at the moment the Second World War ended, to establish the mutual obligation of peoples and races as a founding American principle.
His encounter with colonial India marked him permanently. Witnessing British exploitation and the poverty it produced, he wrote: "I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history."
On religion he was precise about his own contradictions. He described himself as an atheist who had abandoned belief in a personal God, while remaining "a Christian in the literal and difficult sense of sincerely admiring the personality of Christ" — a formulation that captures the man exactly: unwilling to keep a doctrine he could not defend, unwilling to discard a figure he could not stop admiring.
Two Deaths
The end of the Durants' sixty-eight-year partnership was of a piece with the partnership itself. When Will entered hospital in 1981, Ariel stopped eating. She died on 25 October. The family kept the news from him, but Will learned of his wife's death from an evening news broadcast.
He died on 7 November 1981, two days after his ninety-sixth birthday and thirteen days after Ariel. They were buried together at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
The scholarly verdict on the Durants has always been mixed — synthesizers rather than researchers, popularizers working at a scale that guaranteed errors. But the eleven volumes are still in print, still read by people who never took a history course, and still doing the thing their author set out to do at the Labor Temple in 1914: making the inheritance of civilization available to anyone willing to read.
