To the Editor:

Thank you so much for Nancy Yos’s “Civilization Meets the Durants” [October 2001]. It is beautifully written. At the heart of her disillusionment with Will Durant are two issues on which I can shed some light: his literary style and his competence as a historian.

I should begin by saying that Will and Ariel Durant knew me from the day I was born in 1931. When I was orphaned as a teenager, I was taken in and raised by a cousin who was married to Will’s sister Ethel. They lived in the same house that Will grew up in, and I occupied the large bedroom that had been his from childhood. Still in the room was a large bookcase filled with the Latin and Greek textbooks that Will had used at St. Peter’s Prep and St. Peter’s College in nearby Jersey City. Will was an outstanding exemplar of the Jesuit rhetorical training he had received at these schools. His writing conformed to the classical norms of Greek and Latin literature. For years Will was my host for dinner every Sunday evening at Chasen’s Restaurant here in Los Angeles. To Ariel’s delight, he would recite entire orations of Demosthenes in Greek and complete discourses of Cicero in Latin while he enjoyed his special hash browns followed by a generous serving of strawberry shortcake.

Even more significantly, Will followed classical models in his approach to writing philosophy and history. Like the narratives of Xenophon, Thucydides, and Tacitus, the Durants’ 11-volume account of civilization is a story. This is very different from the modern understanding of history.

Herbert J. Ryan
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, California

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To the Editor:

As one who had a similar experience years ago with Arnold Toynbee’s History of Civilization, I appreciated Nancy Yos’s intelligent and entertaining sentiments about first encountering the work of the Durants.

William H. Riddell
Tampa, Florida

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