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Scholar in Progress. Notwithstanding a certain obstreperousness, Will Durant was always a bright student, so bright that the Jesuits at St. Peter's College in Jersey City early marked him as a boy with a priestly vocation. At 18, Will read Darwin and became an atheist. A Jesuit father won him back and Will went on to the seminary, but in his second year he quit school and turned atheist again.
Will plunged into the anarchist movement, but not long after was somewhat shaken in his radical sympathies by a bomb, designed by one of his friends to separate John D. Rockefeller from his millions, which exploded prematurely in Will's room. Three young anarchists were killed, but Will got away with a whole skin. At 27, after his journey to Damascus, Will began to feel a surfeit of lost causes, got married to a girl of 15, and settled down to a slow drift back to the right.
In 1926, after winning his doctorate in philosophy at Columbia, Will Durant published his lectures as The Story of Philosophy. It was a runaway bestseller then, and it is a pretty vigorous one now—in 27 years it has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. The author still enjoys its royalties and takes the justification of his work from what famed John Dewey said of his first book: "This is not popularization. It's humanization."
Will was a natural celebrity. While he labored in silence on the early volumes of his history, he expounded enthusiastically on anything reporters cared to ask him. People? "Most men ought to die at 35." America? "American civilization may collapse unless it stops breeding from the bottom and dying from the top." As for polygamy, he said a word for it "on eugenical grounds."
At 67, white-thatched Will sits quietly at his writing desk eleven hours a day, leaving it only to eat, sleep and putter in the garden or dip in the pool. At this rate he finishes a volume about every five years. Two more volumes and, he says, the job will be over. "In ten years I will be 77 years old and not mentally fit to deal with the 19th century. I'll complete the project by bringing it up to Napoleon . . . I'll end up with a big splash, all sorts of blood spurting around."
* A case of slightly faulty memory, since Buckle died after an attack of typhoid fever.