To have them was to have at one’s fingertips a whole field of understanding – a comforting suggestion of general command in an era of increasing intellectual specialization.įor many, simply possessing these books was assurance enough. Wells’s wildly popular Outline of History. Though Rubin focuses on Will Durant’s solo production, The Story of Philosophy, her observations about the success of that work generally hold true for The Story of Civilization. These single-volume or multi-volume combinations of command and concision – purportedly comprehensive knowledge, systematically arranged and neatly packaged – provided assurance to their readers that everything they needed to make sense of the world (or some particular aspect of it) could be found within the covers of these books. In her indispensable book The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Joan Shelley Rubin situates the career of Will Durant as illustrative of the craze for the “outline” approach to knowledge, exemplified by H.G. A motley eleven-volume set of Will and Ariel Durant’s *Story of Civilization*
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