A Dual Autobiography

Will Durant and Ariel Durant

In this autobiography, 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 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.