In the tradition of his bestselling masterpieces THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION and THE LESSONS OF HISTORY, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durrant traces the lives and ideas of those who have helped to define civilization. Four years before his death, Will Durant began work on an abbreviated version of his highly acclaimed eleven-volume series, THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. The project was conceived as a series of audio lectures, but Durant soon realized that the dialogues could be developed into a book that would serve as a wonderfully readable introduction to the subject of history. Durant completed twenty-one of a proposed twenty-three chapters before his death in 1981, at the age of ninety-six. Those chapters span thousands of years of human history, from Confucius to Shakespeare, from the Roman Empire to the Reformation, finally ended in the eighteenth century. The manuscript was recently found, twenty years after Durant finished it, and its discovery is a major event, not only for lovers of his prose but for students of history and philosophy the world over.