[2] 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.

[3] As a result of their success, he and his wife were jointly awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

[6] Historian Joan Rubin writes of that period, "Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood.

In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu.

[8] In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher and married the 15-year-old Ariel Kaufman; they had one daughter, Ethel, and a "foster" son, Louis, whose mother was Flora—Ariel's sister.

She summarizes the changes in his overall philosophy: Instead of tying human progress to the rise of the proletariat, he made it the inevitable outcome of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents' marriage.

As Ariel later summarized it, he had concocted, by his mid-30s, "that sentimental, idealizing blend of love, philosophy, Christianity, and socialism which dominated his spiritual chemistry" the rest of his life.

[7]Durant was director and lecturer at the Labor Temple School in New York City from 1914 to 1927 while pursuing a PhD at Columbia University that he completed in 1917, the year he also served as an instructor in philosophy.

The Story of Philosophy originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and because it was so popular, it was republished as a hardcover book by Simon & Schuster in 1926[10] and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that allowed them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing The Story of Civilization.

"[This quote needs a citation] They opposed the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called[weasel words] the "cult of the expert.

In the 1990s, an unabridged audiobook production of all 11 volumes was produced by Books On Tape, read by Grover Gardner (under the alias Alexander Adams).

[citation needed] The Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature for Rousseau and Revolution (1967), the 10th volume of The Story of Civilization.

A few years after the books were published, the social commentator Will Rogers read them and he described a symposium which he had attended which included Durant as one of the contributors to it.

[16][17] In The Case for India, Durant wrote that "The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning their career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years.

But I am loath to leave the word God out of my life and creed.”, adding that he was “a Christian in the literal and difficult sense of sincerely admiring the personality of Christ and making a persistent effort to behave like a Christian.”[19] While Durant's work was well received by popular audiences, its academic reception was more critical.

Classics scholar Moses Finley criticised Durant's The Life of Greece on a number of grounds, including the book's racial essentialism and support for the great man theory of history.