A hundred pages into William Manchester‘s, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance Portrait of an Age, I peeked two hundred pages further at his “acknowledgements and sources.” There to my delight (and surprise) I read:
Let me set down those works which have been the underpinning of this volume. First—for their scope and rich detail—three volumes from Will Durant’s eleven-volume Story of Civilization: volume 4, The Age of Faith; volume 5, The Renaissance; and volume 6, The Reformation. The events of those twelve centuries, from the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 to the beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, emerge from Durant’s pages in splendid array.
Here was a popular professor of history and author (The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; The Death of a President: November 20–November 25, 1963; American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964) honoring the work of a popular amateur. Manchester also acknowledged his use of “[a]nother towering monument of historicism,” namely The New Cambridge Medieval History and its Modern sequel, and several other series, but he regarded Durant’s epic narrative as on par with them, even giving it pride of place. I wasn’t expecting such confirmation of my taste, but welcomed it.
One serendipity led to another. Browsing my copies of the three volumes Manchester cited, I found myself enjoying the diverse ways Will Durant (1885-1981) expressed not only awareness of the things upon which the successful completion of his project depended, but also what psychologists call “mortality salience.”
I then took down from the shelf Our Oriental Heritage, the series’Durant’s inaugural tome. 
As its preface drew to a close, I noticed that the author’s eloquent affirmation of purpose, excitement and hope betrayed hardly any awareness of limitations. Here are the words of a man undertaking a massive project in his fiftieth year, in the aftermath of Wall Street’s collapse, the memories of the Great War still fresh in his readers’ minds as the winds of its successor begin to blow in Europe. Where the latter will soon take Western Civilization, of course, he does not predict: Continue reading “Will Durant: Fending off “the Reaper” for almost a century”