One of my undergrad profs denigrated Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, but its "lush, well-constructed sentences" were part of what first drew me to take his class.
"If one grew up with the Book-of-the-Month Club, some corner of a book-shelved house remained forever The Story of Civilization, his eleven-volume, six-million-word chronicle written over half a century and coauthored in later years with his wife, Ariel. The club offered it for decades as an inducement to join, and sold thirteen million of them. An independent scholar who operated outside academe’s protections and won both the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), Durant jump-started then fledgling Simon & Schuster in 1926 with The Story of Philosophy, the all-time best-selling book about its subject if one excepts the Bible. It’s at least arguable that Durant’s maverick life and stimulating prose cross-fertilized each other.
Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Durant headed to St. Peter’s Academy in New Jersey in his teens. At first a Catholic seminarian, he soon turned agnostic and socialist, got a job as a reporter at the New York Evening Journal, and merged his progressive interests with a passionate desire to bring the pageant of Western thought and culture to the masses... one wandered happily with Durant through his lush, well-constructed sentences, splendid hallways connecting gilded rooms in a Byzantine palace."
America the Philosophical" by Carlin Romano: https://a.co/bXO8jAC
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