Diaries and Journals: Literary Legacies

A Survey

Diaries and journals (the terms are interchangeable, both denoting a daily record) are fundamental reflections of American identity from colonial times to the present. America’s first diary writers often began their accounts on the ships that brought colonists to the New World and continued to record their experiences and reactions once they arrived. The early diaries often reflect the writers’ perceptions of themselves as religious and political pioneers in a land blessed by Providence and destined for greatness. The religious element continues in many diaries that record America’s development through revolution, industrialization, the westward movement, and wars. While for a few the diary becomes a record of spiritual development, for others the diary records the writers’ reactions to momentous experiences, such as a long journey through strange terrain, or participation in a war. Another common motivation for diaries is primarily literary, with writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, H. L. Mencken, May Sarton, and Madeleine L'Engle recording the daily observations that might later be included in literary works.

Journals motivated to some degree by travel include that of Sarah Kemble Knight, whose round trip in 1704 from Boston to New York reveals the primitive conditions for travel. Washington Irving’s travel diaries provide substance for his literary tales. John Early, a circuit-riding minister in the early 1800s, wrote an important diary. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis’ journals of an expedition (1804-1806) to the mouth of the Columbia River reveal new flora and fauna, the vast expanses of the continent, and a view of western native people. John C. Frémont, whose explorations and mapping of the American west prepared the way for further westward expansion, also kept a journal. Caroline Seabury, whose travels from Brooklyn, New York, to Columbus, Mississippi, where she taught the daughters of plantation owners prior to and during the Civil War, writes with a Northern bias about Southern social, political, and military conditions. The westward migration to Oregon and California, beginning in the 1840s, inspired many diaries, and Lillian Schlissel has excerpted from over one hundred of them in Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982). Edmund C. Hinde, who came to California during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, kept extensive diaries of his experience; they were published posthumously. Travel diaries continued to be popular in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Peter Beard, an American photographer, has published multiple diaries chronicling his travels in Africa; the diaries often incorporate his photographs.

Some diaries record the experiences of politicians and political insiders. Many US presidents, from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, have kept diaries that were later published, often posthumously. Arthur Schlesinger, who served as a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, wrote approximately 6,000 pages of diary entries involving his political involvement and other topics over the course of his life; a distilled, 894-page version was published in 2007, after his death.

War Diaries

Diaries record all American wars from the Revolutionary War onward. They reflect their writers’ political sympathies, the sufferings and apprehensions of wartime, and frequently their writers’ dependence on God for safety and victory. During the Revolutionary War, Lewis Beebe, a surgeon, deplored the conditions and sufferings of colonial troops. Sally Wister, a Quaker teenager in Pennsylvania, met many officers of the colonial army and, true to her upbringing, avoided discussing politics with them. She does, however, show romantic interest in some. The Civil War produced many diaries from both sides of the conflict. John Crowe Ransom tells of his imprisonment at Andersonville and his eventual escape to Union lines. A more comprehensive view of the war is Elisha Hunt Rhodes’ All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (1992). Rhodes joined the army in Rhode Island and fought in nineteen major battles. Rhodes rose through the ranks and commanded his regiment by the war’s end. Southern views are well represented in Mary Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie (1905). Since Chesnut and her husband James were intimate acquaintances of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and his wife Varina, Chesnut’s diary presents an articulate view of those in power in the South. Two diaries from World War II, Guadalcanal Diary (1943) by Richard Tregaskis and Pacific War Diary (1993) by James Fahey, reveal the stresses and carnage of battle. World War II generals George S. Patton and Joseph Stilwell kept extensive diaries that were later published. The diary of Charles Kikuchi shows the effects of internment in California on Japanese Americans during World War II. Kikuchi’s diary also emphasizes a continuing loyalty to the United States.

While few American diaries regarding later wars were published by 2023, the 1994 collection For Our Beloved Country contains war diaries from the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.

Themes

American diaries present universal themes. Love is a frequent theme. Sexuality appears in various modes (see William Byrd’s diaries from the early eighteenth century for heterosexual accounts or John Cheever’s from the twentieth century for the experiences of a bisexual man). Racial themes are frequent in plantation diaries and those relating to the Civil War. Charlotte L. Forten, from a prominent African American family in Philadelphia, was a teacher; her diary reflects her efforts to educate former slaves in South Carolina. Michael Shiner, born a slave in Washington, DC, and freed as an adult, kept extensive diaries from the time he was eight or nine years old until he was seventy-three; the diaries contain accounts of many instances of cruelty and discrimination that Shiner and those around him experienced. Religious themes, like the revivals that swept some military units during the Civil War and accounts of missions among Indians, are common. Money and its acquisition are important to many diarists.

Politics, courage, patriotism, spiritual introspection, death, family and relational values, optimism, depression, health, education, feminism, adventure—these themes reflect the universal tendencies of American diaries.

Bibliography

Billington, Ray Allen, ed. The Journal of Charlotte Forten. Dryden Press, 1953.

Hughes, Ted, and Frances McCullough, eds. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Dial Press, 1982.

"Journals and Diaries." Encycolpedia.com, www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/journals-and-diaries. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

Mallon, Thomas. "Which Writer's Journal's Are Worth Reading?" The New York Times, 2 Mar. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/books/review/which-writers-journals-are-worth-reading.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Miller, Randall M., and Linda Patterson Miller, eds. The Book of American Diaries. Avon Books, 1995.

Modell, John, ed. The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp—The Tanforan Journals of Charles Kikuchi. University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Morgan, Speer, and Greg Michaelson. For Our Beloved Country: American War Diaries from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.

Rhodes, Robert Hunt, ed. All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes. Vintage Books, 1992.

Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. Schocken Books, 1982.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. Yale University Press, 1981.

Wright, Louis B., and Marion Tinling, eds. The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712. Dietz Press, 1941.