Biographer of Mankind

Will Durant: 1885-1981

It was all Spinoza's fault. In 1908 William James Durant, the Massachusetts-born son of unschooled French-Canadian immigrants, was well on his way to fulfilling his mother's dream that he become a priest. Then he came upon a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in a seminary library. So convincing did he find the 17th century Dutch pantheist that he quickly abandoned the church, deciding instead, as he put it, to pursue a "more intellectually honest life." What he found was another calling. For 48 years, eleven volumes and nearly 10,000 pages, Will Durant labored with monastic devotion on a "biography of mankind" that would place 110 centuries of human thought and endeavor within easy reach for the average reader. The Story of Civilization was, he admitted, "an absurd enterprise, immodest in its very conception," but also irresistible to the compulsive teacher and self-confessed "lover of the lovers of wisdom," who died a week ago at 96.

Radicalism, Durant asserted, is "just the measles of your intellectual growth," and in his early years he had quite a case himself. Said he: "I stood many an evening on a soapbox, preaching 'Socialism, the Hope of the World.' " In 1912, while teaching at the anarchist Ferrer Modern School in New York City, he met dark-eyed Ida Kaufman, a precocious 14-year-old pupil so "sprightly" he called her Puck and later Ariel. She pursued her 27-year-old instructor relentlessly, until he "fell in love with her and kidnaped her and married her." The bride, who carried roller skates to the altar, became his lifelong collaborator. She died just 13 days before he did.

After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1917, Durant lectured on the subject to adult laborers. In 1922 a publisher persuaded him to put his anecdote-filled lectures in writing. The result: a series of 5-c- pamphlets later issued in one volume as The Story of Philosophy. It eventually sold more than 3 million copies.

The Story of Civilization was planned as a five-volume, 25-year project, but the author underestimated his own ardor and longevity. The series expanded, filling the Durants' hours from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. After Volume V came Will's announcement, at 69, that "the imminence of senility" would bring the work to an end with Volume VII. But it was only at age 90, after Volume XI--The Age of Napoleon--that Durant retired. "The ego is willing," he said, "but the machine cannot go on."

Every volume was a bestseller. The tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, won a 1968 Pulitzer Prize. Yet the very qualities that helped sell his books often earned the sneers of scholars. He gave history's eccentrics (Casanova, Caligula) more than their due. He was often glib ("Voltaire + Rousseau = Diderot"). On the other hand, he was capable of aphoristic wisdom that any academician would envy ("A nation is born Stoic, dies Epicurean").

Civilization," Durant once observed, "is a stream with banks." Most historians, he thought, concentrate on the stream, "which is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting." Durant was devoted to what happened on the banks. There, "unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, whittle statues"--or write about it all.

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