- Person
- Ernst Gombrich
- Lived
- 1909–2001
- Field
- Art history, education
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
In the mid-1930s Ernst Gombrich was a young art historian in Vienna with a doctorate and no job. A publisher friend, Walter Neurath, asked him to write a history of the world for children. According to his son Richard, the condition was that he finish it within a single month.
The result, Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser, was published in 1936. Instead of lists of kings and dates, Gombrich told the human story as a tale that had once really happened, speaking directly to a curious child. The book runs from the Stone Age to the age of the atom, and from Confucius and the Buddha to Churchill. It treats ordinary people with sympathy and war with open dislike. The Nazi authorities disliked its pacifism, and Gombrich, whose family the Nazis classified as Jewish, left for London the same year.
The book was translated into several languages before the war and, over time, into 18. Gombrich revised it in the 1960s and added a new final chapter. Near the end of his long life he began translating it into English himself. He died in 2001 before he could finish, and the work was completed by his assistant Caroline Mustill and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich.
Yale University Press published A Little History of the World in 2005, nearly 70 years after it was written. It was illustrated with woodcuts by Clifford Harper. It became an international bestseller for the second time: the Los Angeles Times named it a favorite book of the year, and one Christmas it was the top-selling title at Foyles bookshop in London, ahead of the major novels of the season.
Today the book is read aloud by parents, used by teachers and picked up by adults who never got a connected picture of history at school. It shows that a great scholar can write for a ten-year-old without talking down, and that a short, kind book can carry the whole human story.
Why it matters
A Little History of the World still gives children and adults in many languages a single, humane picture of the human past, from the Stone Age to modern times.
About Ernst Gombrich
Vienna-born art historian whose The Story of Art and A Little History of the World opened art and history to millions of ordinary readers in more than 30 languages.
More about Ernst Gombrich
Sources
- A Little History of the World Yale University Press
- Memoir of Ernst Gombrich, guest post by Richard Gombrich carlgombrich.org
- Ernst Gombrich Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.