Dear diary book illustration6/15/2023 ![]() Good split pea soup" - he struggled with writer's block in the work journal: "I must have the determination to proceed. Steinbeck kept two journals while he was working on "East of Eden." While he wrote brief, banal entries in his life diary - "Got new shorts and socks. Some passages are written in code, like the backward "mirror writing" used by a Norwegian immigrant sailor when he wrote about his future wife. Part of the pleasure of the exhibits is the sense of intimacy the reader has from seeing the original handwriting and physical books, often tattered from use and age. "We read about public events," she says, "but the real stuff of history is about cooking and marriages and personal events." Others are drawn in by the raging popularity of published memoirs, the ease of writing on a computer, or even the excitement of broadcasting their life story over the Internet.įeatured in the Morgan exhibition are 70 journals from both famous figures, such as Albert Einstein, Sir Walter Scott, and Henry David Thoreau, and unfamiliar citizens, such as an American woman who agonizes over her brother's death, an Englishman obsessed with a Spanish woman he met at a masked ball, and an Iraqi artist who describes her house filled with relatives and friends during the Gulf War.Ĭurator Christine Nelson wants to show another side of history. Some are reflective because of the end of the millennium. ![]() More and more people are recording their lives. "It's wonderful to see that people 200 years ago were worrying about the same things," one visitor writes in the exhibition's comment book. Wandering through the cases of journals from the last four centuries on display at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, one is reminded that there is nothing new about the idea of keeping a diary. Alongside them, a young American woman delights in a French dinner party, a sailor writes poetry on a whaling voyage, and a 12-year-old laments, "All this eventful day I have got to write in about the space of a half an hour." ![]() John Steinbeck berates himself for writer's block, Charlotte Bront struggles with homesickness, and Victor Hugo's daughter, Adle, is driven by a romantic obsession.
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