Word: diarist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...filled 50 notebooks. At her death in 1886 she left them to a girlhood friend, who had them published in a highly expurgated edition. The re-editing job that Novelist Ben Ames Williams has done on Mary Chesnut may not only change the old picture of a slightly stuffy diarist, it may also alter a few notions of what life in the Confederacy was like...
...French provincial town. Starting with mild expressions of disgust at existence, the entries run a truly resourceful gamut of the grotesque, the dispiriting, and the desperate. There is not a human being in the book who is not in some way loathsome, and the hyperconsciousness of the diarist soon gets to the point of seeing everything in a light both ghastly and obscene. One of Novelist Sartre's revelations...
Thirty-five years ago, Frank Maloy Anderson, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and later at Dartmouth, set out to identify the anonymous diarist. This week he published his findings. He had at last located his man, and had come to a surprising and historically important conclusion about the diary itself...
...Tall Man. To find his man, Professor Anderson worked by a patient process of elimination. The late Allen Johnson, editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, had decided on internal evidence that the diarist must have been 1) a New Englander, 2) a former Whig, 3) a Republican in 1860-61, 4) a Senator. Anderson eventually decided that Johnson might be wrong on any or all counts...
...then drew his own composite picture of the unknown diarist-a tall man, an important individual, friendly with Seward, Sumner, Douglas and lesser figures such asr William Aspinwall and James Orr, a man of the world, with a good knowledge of the French language, a strong Unionist with many Southern friends, a man with many business interests and a wide acquaintance in New York City, and-above all-a man who had been in New York City on Feb. 20, 1861, and in Washington on some 20 days between Dec. 28, 1860 and March...