A Little History of the World

In 1935, with a doctorate and no job, the twenty-five year old Ernst Gombrich was invited to attempt an history of the world for younger readers. Written in an intense six weeks, Eine Kurze Weltgeshichte fur Junge Leser was first published in Vienna the same year. An immediate success, it has since been translated into seventeen languages. The original German edition was reissued in 1985 with an epilogue bringing the story to the present, and Gombrich further revised it shortly before his death, aged 92, in 2001.