Diary collection – what fascinating reading!
“I have tried to keep diaries before,” John Steinbeck writes in a giant ledger book filled with his methodical script, “but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.”
This particular journal, on display at the Morgan Library & Museum in a compelling exhibition that opened on Friday, “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” has such a modest goal — chronicling Steinbeck’s work on “The Grapes of Wrath” — that it probably does not bend the truth too much. But spend some time with these diaries, intelligently culled from the Morgan’s archives by Christine Nelson, the museum’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, and you see how fervently the keepers of journals labor to shape accounts of themselves.