Diary is a written account of a person’s experiences and thoughts, recorded each day or every few days. Many people keep diaries as a personal record. Most do not intend that other people read their diaries.
Diaries resemble journals, and the two words are often used interchangeably. However, journals are generally less personal than diaries, and many journals are written for other people to read.
Throughout history, people have kept diaries. Some diaries provide insight into the events and customs of a particular period. One of the most famous historical diaries was written by Samuel Pepys, a British government official. Pepys’s diary, written in a personal code, covers the period from 1660 to 1669. Pepys was a sociable, prosperous Londoner who made keen observations about public events. His diary includes information on the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, which occurred in 1666. Pepys’s diary was not decoded until the early 1800’s. The complete diary was first published in nine volumes during the 1970’s.
The diary of William Byrd II, a wealthy landowner in colonial Virginia, vividly portrays the lives of well-to-do colonists during the 1700’s. Perhaps the best-known diary of the 1900’s was written by Anne Frank, a young German-Jewish girl. She and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II to avoid persecution. From 1942 to 1944, Frank kept a record of her experiences in The Diary of Anne Frank (1947).
Many authors of fiction have written novels and short stories in the form of diaries. Such tales have a highly personal quality because the reader can become closely involved with the personality of the central character. The Russian author Nikolai Gogol wrote “The Diary of a Madman” (1835), a short story in the form of the diary of a clerk. In the novel Dangling Man (1944), the American author Saul Bellow portrays the hero of the story in the act of writing a diary. The novel consists largely of the hero’s diary entries.
See also Bellow, Saul; Burney, Fanny; Byrd, William, II; Diary of Anne Frank; Frank, Anne; Pepys, Samuel.
