Will & Ariel Durant: A Dual Autobiography
by Will Durant, Ariel Durant
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"In this magnificently readable autobiography by the authors of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant celebrate and examine a lifetime of ideas, friendships, triumphs and love. The story of their life together, rich in brilliant anecdotes and with the names of the countless famous people they knew, is a passionate record of their shared experience as lovers, as husband and wife, as world travelers, and as the authors of one of the most famous and successful works of scholarship in show more American literary history. Ariel and Will Durant met and fell in love in 1912. He was a teacher at the anarchist Ferrer Center in New York, a young man already in love with the world of ideas, who had quit the seminary (to his family's chagrin) in search of freedom. She was fourteen years old, so young that she roller-skated on her way to City Hall for her marriage, the daughter of penniless immigrants struggling to survive in the New World, inheritor of all the rebellious traditions and the determination to survive of the Russian ghetto from which her family came. Together they shared not only a burning love for each other but a passionate hunger for ideas. Their book takes us with them on their incredible and fascinating intellectual journey, beginning with their interest in anarchism (which brought them close to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman) and going on through a long, shared lifetime that brought them honors, fame and the acquaintanceship of almost every major literary and intellectual personality in Europe and the United States. Their book is remarkably frank and deeply moving, at once a star-studded history of the decades through which they lived and worked and a passionate, intimate and powerful tribute to a great and enduring love."--Dust jacket. show lessTags
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Author Information
259+ Works 30,146 Members
Will Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts on November 5, 1885. He received an undergraduate degree at St. Peter's College in New Jersey and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. His first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem, was published in 1917. His other works include The Story of Philosophy, The Mansions of Philosophy, show more and the ten-volume The Story of Civilization. By the time the seventh volume was published in 1961, his wife Ariel Durant was listed as a coauthor for her diligent assistance on the project. In 1968 they received the Pulitzer Prize for Rousseau and Revolution. The husband and wife team also wrote A Dual Autobiography in 1977. He died on November 7, 1981. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
96+ Works 26,410 Members
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Will Durant; Ariel Durant
- Dedication
- To Ethel, Jim, and Monica
- First words
- Ariel: My hand shakes as I grope into the jungle of the past to find the sources of that troubled stream which is my life.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Once again, probably for the last time, we bid our readers a grateful goodbye. But we are not really leaving them. They can always find us between the covers of our books.
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- Members
- 148
- Popularity
- 220,217
- Rating
- (3.88)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
