Will Durant

William James Durant (November 5, 1885–November 7, 1981) was an American philosopher, historian, and writer. He is best known for his authorship and co-authorship with his wife Ariel Durant of The Story of Civilization.

Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the United States. He fought for equal wages, women's suffrage and fairer working conditions for the American labor force. Durant not only wrote on many topics but also put his ideas into effect. Durant, it has been said widely, attempted to bring philosophy to the common man. He authored The Story of Philosophy, The Mansions of Philosophy, and, with the help of his wife, Ariel, wrote The Story of Civilization. He also wrote magazine articles.

He tried to improve understanding of viewpoints of human beings and to have others forgive foibles and human waywardness. He chided the comfortable insularity of what is now known as Eurocentrism, by pointing out in Our Oriental Heritage that Europe was only a "a jagged promontory of Asia." He complained of "the provincialism of our traditional histories which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line" and said they showed "a possibly fatal error of perspective and intelligence."

A note on some of the terminology: as fashions in nomenclature have changed, sometimes drastically, in the decades since these books were written, terms such as "Mohammedan" and "Negro" (and others which the historically unaware populace sometimes mistakenly consider derogatory) merely reflect the then current parlance.

In 1900, Will was educated by the Jesuits in St. Peter's Preparatory School and, later, Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 1905, he became a Socialist. He graduated in 1907. He worked as a reporter for Arthur Brisbane's New York Evening Journal for ten dollars a week. At the Evening Journal, he wrote several articles on sexual criminals.
Following this, in 1907, he began teaching Latin, French, English and geometry at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. Durant was also made librarian at the college.

In 1911 he left the Seminary. He became the teacher and chief pupil of the Ferrer Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education. Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of Europe. At the Modern School, he fell in love with and married a pupil, thirteen years his junior, Chaya (Ida) Kaufman, whom he later nicknamed "Ariel". The Durants had one daughter, Ethel, and adopted a son, Louis. Ariel would contribute materially to all the volumes of The Story of Civilization but was given title page credit starting only with Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins.

In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher. To support themselves, he began lecturing in a Presbyterian church for five- and ten-dollar fees; the material for these lectures became the starting point for The Story of Civilization. Freeman paid his tuition for the graduate school of Columbia University.
In 1917, working on a doctorate in philosophy, Will Durant wrote his first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem. He discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it avoided the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate in 1917. He was also an instructor at Columbia University.

The Story of Philosophy originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as a hardcover book[1] and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that would allow them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing The Story of Civilization. He retired from teaching and began work on the eleven volume Story of Civilization. Will drafted a civil rights "Declaration of Interdependence" in the early 1940s, nearly a full decade before the Brown decision (see Brown v. Board of Education) ignited the Civil Rights Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945.

The Durants strove throughout The Story of Civilization to create what they called "integral history." They opposed this to the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the West, including not just the usual wars, politics and biography of greatness and villainy, but also the culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the rise of mass communication.

Much of The Story considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the twenty-five hundred years their "story" of the West covers. They also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the repetition of the "dominance of strong over the weak, the clever over the simple." The Story of Civilization is the most successful historiographical series in history. It has been said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a publishing house.