The Roller Skater and the Seminarian
On October 31, 1913 — Halloween, though nobody seems to have remarked on the symbolism — a fifteen-year-old girl named Ida Kaufman roller-skated from Harlem to New York City Hall to marry her twenty-eight-year-old teacher. She arrived, by her own later account, "all flushed and sweaty, with a torn stocking and a skinned knee." The groom, a lapsed Catholic seminarian from Massachusetts who had discovered Darwin in the Jersey City public library and lost his faith somewhere between Spinoza and Herbert Spencer, looked at this girl — born Chaya Kaufman in the Ukrainian city of Proskurov, fifth of seven children of a struggling clothing salesman and the poetic daughter of a biblical scholar — and decided that the name Ida did not suit her. He renamed her Ariel, after the sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest. "I always pictured her about to fly off," he said years later, remembering her gliding along the sidewalks of New York on her skates.
She kept the name. She kept the husband. And together they would spend the next sixty-eight years producing the most ambitious work of popular history ever attempted — eleven volumes, four million words, nearly ten thousand pages, spanning from the earliest civilizations through Napoleon, earning a Pulitzer Prize, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, millions of readers, and the quiet contempt of academic historians who found the whole enterprise too readable to be serious. They died within thirteen days of each other in the autumn of 1981. He was ninety-six. She was eighty-three. The doctors never told him she had gone first.
This is, at the most reductive level, a love story. But it is also something stranger — a story about what happens when two radically different people, separated by thirteen years, by religion, by continent of origin, by temperament, decide to treat the entire record of human civilization as their shared project, their collaborative marriage, their joint argument with mortality. Will Durant once wrote that "the individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind." The line appears in The Reformation, published in 1957, but it reads now like a verdict on his own life, delivered in advance.
By the Numbers
The Durant Partnership
11Volumes of The Story of Civilization (1935–1975)
~4MWords across the series
~10,000Pages in the complete set
2M+Copies of The Story of Philosophy sold in first three decades
40Years spent writing The Story of Civilization
68Years of marriage (1913–1981)
5,000+Books Ariel read for research on the series
The Education of a Heretic
William James Durant — named, one suspects with some irony, after the philosopher — was born on November 5, 1885, in North Adams, Massachusetts, to Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, French-Canadian Catholics who had emigrated from Quebec. The family moved to New Jersey in 1892, and the boy was channeled, with the full force of maternal aspiration, toward the priesthood. His mother's logic was transactional in the way that only deep faith permits: if one member of the family became a priest, the entire clan would be delivered to heaven regardless of their earthly conduct. Young Will was elected to carry this spiritual insurance policy.
He attended St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, then St. Peter's College, where he graduated in 1907. He was, by all accounts, a serious and obedient student. But obedience has its half-life, and Durant's expired in the stacks of the Jersey City Public Library, where he "devoured every book he could" and encountered the men who would dismantle his faith: Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel, "and other terrible fellows," as he later put it with characteristic dryness. The seminary at Seton Hall beckoned — his mentor, Monsignor James Mooney, who had once compared Durant to Thomas Aquinas, had become rector and president there — and Durant went, teaching Latin, French, English, and geometry while serving as librarian and grappling with what he perceived as the irreconcilable claims of faith and intellect.
He would later write that "religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past." This was not the observation of a man who had casually shed his Catholicism. It was the diagnosis of someone who had loved the thing he left, and who spent the rest of his life trying to understand why civilizations needed it.
Before the seminary fully released him, Durant took a detour through radical politics. He discovered
William Randolph Hearst — "a rather queer combination, Darwin and Hearst," he conceded — and would travel to New York in the evenings to root for Hearst's mayoral campaign until he lost his voice. His mother, sitting up past midnight, assumed her son was visiting prostitutes. "I'd never dreamt that she had this in her mind," Durant recalled, "but it's an example of how thoughtless we can be to those we love deeply." He was, he noted ruefully, "the very best virgin she would ever know."
By 1911, he had abandoned both the seminary and Hearst, and was teaching at the Ferrer Modern School in New York City, an anarchist-inspired experimental school named after the Spanish free-thinker Francisco Ferrer. He had passed through socialism, flirted with anarchism, and was beginning to settle — with the obstinacy that would define his intellectual life — into the conviction that philosophy, not politics, offered the only durable approach to the problems of human existence. "Other studies may tell us how man might behave, or how he should behave," he would later say. "History tells us how he has behaved for six thousand years."
It was at the Ferrer School that he met the girl on roller skates.
Proskurov to Harlem to Greenwich Village
Ariel Durant's origin story could be a parable about the century that made her. She was born Chaya Kaufman — her English name was Ida — on May 10, 1898, in Proskurov (later Khmelnytsky), a city in western Ukraine that would become notorious for a 1919 pogrom that killed over a thousand Jews. Her father, Joseph Kaufman, was a clothing salesman who did what millions of Eastern European Jews did in that era: he left for America to find something better, then sent for the family. Her mother, Ethel Appel, was the stylish and poetic daughter of a biblical scholar, a woman of "full and intense personality" — Ariel's own description, offered in A Dual Autobiography with a sympathetic precision that suggests the daughter recognized in the mother her own restlessness.
The family reunited in New York after a forced quarantine in England. They sold newspapers. They moved constantly. There were seven children. Ethel, worn out by childbearing and poverty, eventually denied her husband further intimacies and moved out to pursue what Ariel would later characterize as her mother's "bohemian and socialist interests" — though she maintained her family ties with a fierceness that transcended ideology. When news of Ariel's marriage to a gentile reached the Old World, Ethel's great-uncle reacted with such fury that her mother borrowed money to return to Proskurov to placate him. The timing was catastrophic: World War I broke out, and Ethel was interned in Russia. The American consul in Odessa eventually arranged safe passage home in August 1915.
Ariel — still Ida at this point — was a "recalcitrant student." The word appears in nearly every biographical account, always in the same position, like a diagnosis that has become a badge of honor. She observed a class at the Ferrer Modern School meeting in Central Park and enrolled herself on the spot. She was fourteen. Will Durant was twenty-seven. She fell in love with her teacher. The teacher, eventually, fell in love back.
The asymmetries are staggering, and no honest account can elide them: the age gap, the power dynamic, the fact that she was a child by any modern standard. Durant's novel Transition, published in 1927 and described as "largely an autobiographical account of his own early social, religious, and political disillusionments," offers a version of these events filtered through fiction's protective gauze. What is beyond dispute is that the marriage endured for nearly seven decades, produced a genuine intellectual partnership, and evolved — through rebellion, estrangement, reconciliation, and the slow accretion of shared work — into something that neither partner's younger self could have anticipated.
"We're different people," Ariel said after the Civilization series was completed. "Male and female. Different races. Different religious backgrounds. It was our differences that made us grow."
Philosophy for the Common Man
The book that made Will Durant famous — and that financed the decades of work to come — was not a history. It was
The Story of Philosophy, published in 1926 by Simon & Schuster, and it did something that academic philosophers found either inspiring or unforgivable: it made philosophy interesting to people who had no intention of getting a PhD. The book sold a million copies in its first year alone. By the late 1970s, total sales exceeded three million. Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney — a man who debated Durant publicly on whether man was a machine — said of it: "There are few people whom I have ever known for whom I have a higher regard and a greater appreciation. I'd rather have written his book on
The Story of Philosophy than to have done anything or everything that I ever did."
The book's success was not an accident of timing, though timing helped. As the historian Croften Kelly has observed, "In the first few decades of the twentieth century, enormous increases in literacy vastly expanded the market for books in many academic subjects, including history. At the same time, universities also expanded rapidly, creating far more professional historians whose work became increasingly fragmented and specialized." A vast new reading public wanted to know about Plato and Spinoza and Nietzsche, but the professionals who studied these thinkers had stopped speaking in a language the public could understand. Durant occupied the gap.
His approach was simple in conception and extraordinarily difficult in execution: tell the stories of the great philosophers as lives, not as systems. Connect their ideas to their biographies, their temperaments, their historical moments. Write with "an accessible style" — the phrase that recurs in nearly every assessment — and trust that a reader who came for the anecdotes would stay for the arguments. Durant conceived of philosophy not as the parsing of epistemological puzzles but as what he called "total perspective," or seeing things sub specie totius — "from the perspective of the whole" — a phrase he derived from Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis. He sought, in his own words, "to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application."
The professionals were not amused. Academic historians and philosophers would spend the better part of the twentieth century dismissing Durant as a popularizer — the word deployed as an accusation — who presented, in the New York Times's delicate formulation, "a simplified, overly sunny great-man view." Kelly summarizes the charge more bluntly: critics found him "careless with his facts and too dramatic with his words." Durant was aware of these objections and bore them with a patience that may itself have been a philosophical achievement. He never pretended to be doing what they were doing. He was doing something else entirely.
Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.
Ariel had assisted with the research for The Story of Philosophy. The collaboration was fruitful. It was also, at this stage, invisible. No one — least of all the reading public — knew that the young woman who had roller-skated to her wedding was poring over source materials, shaping arguments, pushing back on her husband's conclusions. The Durants' intellectual partnership predated its public acknowledgment by decades, a fact that tells you something about the era and something about the marriage.
Forty Years at the Desk
The ambition that drove the Durants' life's work is easier to state than to comprehend. Sometime in the late 1920s, flush with the success of
The Story of Philosophy, Will and Ariel began gathering materials for a project they would eventually call
The Story of Civilization — a multi-volume narrative history of human civilization from its earliest origins to the modern era, written for the general reader, encompassing not merely the wars and kings that constituted conventional history but also art, philosophy, science, religion, music, manners, and morals. Will retired from teaching at Manhattan's Labor Temple School. The couple began to write.
Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume, appeared in 1935. Durant was fifty years old. He had originally planned five volumes. He would produce eleven, the last — The Age of Napoleon — published in 1975, when he was ninety. The series spanned approximately 2,500 years, from ancient Greece through the Napoleonic Wars, with substantial detours through the Middle East, India, China, and Japan. The volumes totaled four million words. There were notes for a twelfth volume, The Age of Darwin, and an outline for a thirteenth, The Age of Einstein, which would have carried the story to 1945. The authors died before they could write them.
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The Story of Civilization: Volumes and Timeline
Forty years, eleven volumes, four million words.
1935I. Our Oriental Heritage
1939II. The Life of Greece
1944III. Caesar and Christ
1961VII. The Age of Reason Begins (first volume crediting Ariel as co-author)
1963VIII. The Age of Louis XIV
The method was as remarkable as the ambition. For each volume, the Durants traveled extensively — to the countries, ruins, museums, and libraries that held the material they needed. Ariel pored over some 5,000 books, "jotting down facts for Will, who told the story in 2 million words while she helped shape judgments," as UPI reported. Will maintained a punishing schedule of lecture tours across the country to finance the research and travel — in and out of trains, hotels, and lecture halls for a month at a time, "all the while working away at his books," as one reader of their autobiography noted with something approaching awe. The Durants were good friends with the founders of Simon & Schuster, and a symbiotic relationship formed: the publisher needed the prestige and sales of the series, and the Durants needed the advance money and distribution to keep the project alive.
The work was — and this is the word that keeps surfacing in assessments by those who have actually read all eleven volumes — companionable. One reviewer who spent eight years completing the set described Durant's prose as "urbane without ever being taxing to read," noting that "each page has at least one unexpected detail, one memorable anecdote, or one amusing aside." H.L. Mencken called the volume on Caesar and Christ "the best piece of historical synthesis ever done by an American." The New York Herald Tribune found "certain passages which may well bear comparison for sheer literary power with anything in contemporary literature." By 1975, the New York Times was willing to call the Durants "the greatest historians of our time."
The academic establishment remained unconvinced. The Durants had not done primary research. They were synthesizers, not discoverers. Their narrative centered on great individuals — artists, philosophers, rulers — at the expense of the broader social, economic, and structural forces that professional historians increasingly regarded as the real engines of change. The series was, in the devastating shorthand of the academy, popular history.
Durant acknowledged the limitations with characteristic grace. "The historian always oversimplifies," he wrote in The Age of Faith, "and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend." He was not trying to replace academic history. He was trying to do something the academy had ceased to do: make the past feel like it mattered to ordinary people. That this ambition struck some scholars as vulgar tells you more about the scholars than about Durant.
The Invisible Collaborator
The most consequential fact about The Story of Civilization is one that went unacknowledged for twenty-six years. Ariel Durant was involved in the writing of every volume from the beginning. She was not credited as co-author until 1961, with the publication of the seventh volume, The Age of Reason Begins.
The reasons for this delayed recognition are multiple and none of them are fully satisfying. The conventions of the era relegated wives to the acknowledgments section. Will's name was the brand; adding a co-author might have confused the market. And Ariel herself, though never lacking in confidence or combativeness — "she had a mind of her own and was never afraid to debate him on any subject," UPI reported — may not have initially insisted on the credit she deserved. The dynamic was complex: she was his research partner, his intellectual sparring partner, his first reader, his conscience. In the fourth volume, The Age of Faith, Will included an essay on the roots of antisemitism after Ariel — born Jewish, married to a Catholic, living inside a project that narrated the Christian centuries — insisted that he "fairly represent medieval Jewry." The essay exists because she demanded it.
Her contributions went far beyond research. In
A Dual Autobiography, published in 1977, the couple described their working relationship with a candor that is itself instructive. Rather than a collaboration with a single blended voice, each wrote their own sections in their own voice — sometimes riffing off each other, sometimes disagreeing. "It was like witnessing a long marriage on the page," one reviewer observed. "I thought Will the better writer of the two, but Ariel was more devilish, fun, and often had more interesting things to say."
The Los Angeles Times awarded Ariel the 1965 Woman of the Year Award in Literature — a recognition that, by arriving two years before the Pulitzer and twelve years before the Medal of Freedom, suggests that at least some observers understood earlier than others the nature of the partnership. The couple received the French government's medallions as well, and Ariel became, in the final two decades of the project, its public face alongside Will — a woman who had gone from teenage bride to world-recognized historian without ever acquiring the formal education that her husband and his critics took for granted.
We're different people. Male and female. Different races. Different religious backgrounds. It was our differences that made us grow.
When she was not at the desk, Ariel rebelled against domestic isolation with a persistence that mirrored her adolescent defiance. She biked to Boston, then beckoned her husband to retrieve her. When Will traveled for lectures, she frequented the bohemian haunts of Greenwich Village, making "loans" to aspiring artists — a word the biographers place in quotation marks, suggesting that the money was not expected back. She was, in other words, entirely herself: the recalcitrant student who had enrolled herself in an anarchist school, the teenager who had roller-skated to her own wedding, the immigrant's daughter who refused to be contained by anyone's expectations, including her husband's.
One Hundred Pages of Hazardous Conclusions
In the late 1960s, while rereading and revising their ten completed volumes with an eye toward a corrected edition, the Durants began making notes — "events and comments that might illuminate present affairs, future probabilities, the nature of man, and the conduct of states." The result was
The Lessons of History, published in 1968, a hundred-page distillation of everything they had learned across four decades and five thousand years of recorded human experience. It is arguably the densest book per page ever written.
"It is a precarious enterprise," they wrote in the preface, "and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed."
They proceeded through thirteen chapters — Hesitations, History and the Earth, Biology and History, Race and History, Character and History, Morals and History, Religion and History, Economics and History, Socialism and History, Government and History, History and War, Growth and Decay, Is Progress Real? — and what emerged was not a summary but an argument. Not a textbook but a philosophy. The book's central conviction, expressed with the quiet authority of people who have spent half a century reading about human folly, is that human nature changes "with geological leisureliness" — that the instincts driving a Greek in Plato's Athens and a Frenchman in modern Paris are functionally identical, that "means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care."
From this premise, the Durants derived their lessons.
Competition is "not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life." Freedom and equality are "sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies." Concentration of wealth is "natural and inevitable," periodically alleviated by "violent or peaceable partial redistribution" in what amounts to the "slow heartbeat of the social organism." Religion, despite the skeptic's objections, is "seemingly indispensable, in every land and age." Morals produce order out of natural chaos. Democracy is "the most difficult of all forms of government." History is color-blind. Progress is real — but fragile, and defined not as the increase of happiness but as "the increasing control of the environment by life."
Shane Parrish, who runs the intellectual website Farnam Street, has called The Lessons of History the book that "contains as much wisdom per page as anything we've ever read." Patrick O'Shaughnessy placed it at the top of his "per-page value" reading list. David Senra devoted an entire episode of the Founders podcast to it. It is the rare book that seems to become more relevant with each passing decade — not because its conclusions are novel, but because they are, in the Durants' formulation, the kind of conclusions that every generation must relearn the hard way.
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
The Great Man Question
Late in their lives, the Durants sat for a series of interviews that have since become nearly as quotable as the books themselves. In one exchange, an interviewer asked Will whether certain individuals — the genius, the great man, the hero — had been the prime determinants of human history, as Thomas Carlyle believed. Durant's answer was characteristically nuanced:
"There are many cases, I think, in which individual characters have had very significant results upon history. But basically, I think Carlyle was wrong. That the hero is a product of a situation rather than the result being a product of the hero. It is demand that brings out the exceptional qualities of man."
He offered Lenin as an example — a man who would have been a footnote had the Russian situation not placed impossible demands on his capacity. "I think the ability of the average man could be doubled if it were demanded, if the situation demanded." This was not false modesty or historical determinism. It was the observation of a man who had spent decades watching civilizations rise when conditions and individuals aligned, and collapse when they didn't. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt — the three most admired American presidents — were all men who held office during the three wars that defined American history. Would they have been remembered the same way absent those crises? Probably not.
The Durants' answer to the great-man question is, ultimately, a both/and: character matters, but character is forged by circumstance. Greatness is latent in many; it is activated by few, and only when the situation demands it. This is not a comfortable conclusion for people who prefer their heroes pre-assembled, but it is a conclusion that the evidence supports — and the Durants, whatever their critics said, always followed the evidence.
The Faith of the Agnostic
Will Durant's spiritual trajectory is one of the quiet dramas of twentieth-century intellectual life. He began as a devout Catholic, destined by maternal ambition for the priesthood. He became an atheist in the wake of Darwin and Spencer. He settled, finally, into agnosticism — but an agnosticism so saturated with respect for religion's social function that it sometimes reads as faith by another name.
"Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion," the Durants wrote in The Lessons of History, "since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age." This was not the grudging concession of a rationalist who wished the world were otherwise. It was the considered judgment of a man who had watched religion sustain civilizations and had come to believe that some version of it would always be necessary — not because its metaphysical claims were true, but because human beings cannot organize themselves without shared narratives about meaning, morality, and the consequences of behavior.
"As long as there is poverty there will be gods," the Durants observed. And: "Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows."
Durant once described his time as analogous to "the period 200 B.C. to 100 A.D., in which morals floundered in an ocean of competing religions, just as you have a flotsam and jetsam of religions today." He deplored the loss of aristocratic standards and the rise of permissive culture. "Everything's all right if it's not going to kill you," he said, sounding less like a progressive historian than a disappointed priest. "I'm sure the situation may get morally worse, and culturally worse."
"Any man who has the same ideas at the age of 92 that he had at the age of 22, or 32, or 62, has not been thinking," he said. "
Change is a sign of growth, not despair." This from a man who had moved from Catholicism to socialism to anarchism to philosophy to history, and who understood — because history had taught him — that the capacity to change one's mind was itself a form of intellectual courage.
The Meaning of History
What was it all for? Not the career — the Pulitzer, the Medal of Freedom, the millions of books sold — but the subject itself. Why study history?
Durant's answer, delivered in interviews and in the books themselves with a consistency that suggests he had been refining it for decades, is deceptively simple: "History is the record of the activities of mankind and it has two sides — one is the crimes and absurdities and the other is the contributions to civilization, the lasting developments which enabled each generation to proceed with a larger heritage than the one before. And that to me is the meaning of history."
He rejected Voltaire's definition of history as "the record of the crimes and absurdities of mankind" as "very unworthy." He offered instead a definition rooted in what he and Ariel called progress — not progress as the increase of happiness, which they dismissed as naïve ("our capacity for fretting is endless"), but progress as "the increasing control of the environment by life" and, more profoundly, as the accumulation of heritage. "If progress is real," they wrote, "it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being."
This is the image that gives the Durants' work its deepest coherence: history as a rising pedestal, each generation born a little higher than the last, not because human nature has improved — it hasn't, and won't — but because the accumulated wisdom, art, and knowledge of the past lifts us, if we bother to receive it. The operative word is if. Education, in the Durants' conception, is not "the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns" but "the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life."
This is why they wrote the way they did — not for specialists but for "the common man and woman," believing that philosophy and history were not the playgrounds of professional academics but pastimes available to all who wished to understand the meaning of life. Their entire body of work can be read as a single, sustained argument that the past is not dead weight but living infrastructure — "the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future."
Thirteen Days
In 1976, Ariel told an interviewer that she and her husband had accomplished what they had set out to do — write the story of civilization — and were fortunate to have time to enjoy themselves before they died. The following year, they published
A Dual Autobiography, their final collaboration, a celebration of ideas, friendships, shared experiences as lovers, mates, and co-authors. In January 1977, they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford in a ceremony at the White House. The citation was not preserved in the sources, but the company they kept that afternoon — John Bardeen, Norman Borlaug, General Omar Bradley, Joe DiMaggio, Bruce Catton — suggests the range of American achievement the medal was meant to honor.
Ariel suffered a stroke in 1978 and was confined to a wheelchair. Her health deteriorated over three years. Will, by then in his mid-nineties, was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in October 1981 following surgery. He was in serious condition.
Ariel died on October 25, 1981, a Sunday night, in the couple's Hollywood Hills home. She was eighty-three. The family made the extraordinary decision not to tell Will. "We are trying to keep the news from him," a family spokeswoman said, adding that the couple would have celebrated their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary that week.
Will Durant died on November 7, 1981 — two days after his ninety-sixth birthday — of heart failure, at Cedars-Sinai. He never learned that Ariel had preceded him. The hospital confirmed his death the following day. Thirteen days separated them.
In 2013, thirty-two years after their deaths, Will Durant's granddaughter found a manuscript in a box in her attic. It was Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War and God, written when Durant was in his early eighties, long believed lost. He had mentioned it in interviews in the 1970s, once calling it "a not very serious book which answers the questions of what I think about government, life, death, God." Simon & Schuster published it in December 2014.
"Life might be unforgivable if it were not for death," Durant had said in one of his last public appearances, in his ninety-fourth year. "Suppose you live forever. Not only would you be useless to everyone around you but you'd be sick and tired of being what you are. The thought you'd not be allowed to die would be a horrible thought. Has it ever occurred to you that death is a blessing?"
A line from The Reformation, published twenty-four years before his own death, written at a desk where a girl who once roller-skated to her wedding was almost certainly sitting nearby: "The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind."
