The Literary Author as Diarist

[para. 1]: "In 1923, after nearly a decade of diary keeping, the Cuban-French-American author Anaïs Nin (1903– 77) recorded in her journal, “Someday I want to write about this, as a tribute to a much despised form of literature, as an answer to those who have shrugged their shoulders when they saw me bending over a mere diary. I shall try to give diary writing a definite character and a definite place in life, and for the sake of the practical people who have wept over the wasted hours, I shall demonstrate the uses, the purpose, the visibly beneficial effects, of the much deplored habit.” 1 While a plethora of nonliterary authors have gained a literary reputation through the publication of their journals— for example, peeress Lady Anne Clifford (1590– 1676) and naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633– 1703)—this chapter focuses on professional creative writers in English in Britain, the United States, and Canada whose diaries have also been published. In particular, I analyze the diaries of Nin as well as Virginia Woolf (1882– 1941), Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875– 1935), John Cheever (1912– 82), and George Fetherling (1949–) as exemplary twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners of the genre.