Will & Ariel Durant - The Story of Civilization Volumes 1-11 [1935-1975][Ed. 2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: June 1993 | ISBN-10: 1567310230 | ISBN-13: 978-1567310238
The STORY OF CIVILIZATION by Will Durant represents the most comprehensive attempt in our times to embrace the vast panorama of man's history and culture. This 11 volume set includes: Vo1 : Our Oriental Heritage; Vol 2: The Life of Greece; Vol.3: Caesar and Christ; Vol 4: The Age of Faith; Vol 5: The Renaissance; Vol 6: The Reformation; Vol 7: The Age of Reason Begins; Vol 8: The Age of Louis XIV; Vol 9:The Age of Voltaire; Vol. 10: Rousseau and Revolution; Vol 11: The Age of Napoleon.

The Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader. The volumes sold well for many years, and sets of them were frequently offered by book clubs.
The series was written over a span of more than four decades. It totals four million words across nearly 10,000 pages, but is incomplete. In the first volume (Our Oriental Heritage, which covers the history of the East through 1933), Will Durant stated that he wanted to include the history of the West through the early 20th century. However, the series ends with The Age of Napoleon because the Durants both died in the 1980s – she in her 80s and he in his 90s – before they could complete additional volumes.
The first six volumes of The Story of Civilization are credited to Will Durant alone, with Ariel recognized only in the Acknowledgements. Beginning with The Age of Reason Begins, Ariel is credited as a co-author.

Objective
Durant said his purpose in writing the series was not to create a definitive scholarly production but to make a large amount of information accessible and comprehensible to the educated public in the form of a comprehensive "composite history." Given the massive undertaking in creating 11 volumes over 50 years, errors and incompleteness were inevitable by Durant's own reckoning; but he claimed that no other historical survey matches, let alone exceeds, the breadth and depth of his project.
As Durant says in the preface to his first work, Our Oriental Heritage:
I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind – to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments in government, the aspirations of religion, the mutations of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art. I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception … Nevertheless I have dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this undertaking, it may be of some use to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and time, as well as to seek them through science in space. … Like philosophy, such a venture [as the creation of these 11 volumes] has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
—Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, preface

About the Authors
William James Durant (/dəˈrænt/; November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was an American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things sub specie totius, a phrase inspired by Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis. He sought 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.
Ariel Durant (10 May 1898 – 25 October 1981) was a Russian-born American researcher and writer, the co-author of The Story of Civilization. She was born in Proskurov, Russian Empire (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) as Chaya Kaufman to Jewish parents Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband while a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York City. Will was then a teacher at the school, but resigned his post to marry Ariel, who was fifteen at the time of the wedding on October 31, 1913.
Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.