Diaries, Real and Imagined
Author |
Title and Call Number |
| Jim Carroll (Penguin,1987) | 920 C236b - The Basketball Diaries |
| A poet and teenaged heroin addict, Carroll began recording his daily life in 1963. | |
| Latoya Hunter (Crown,1992) | 920 H917a - The Diary of Latoya Hunter: My First Year in Junior High |
| Latoya writes about her experiences living in the Bronx. | |
| Carolina Maria de Jesus (New American Library,1963) | 920 J499c - Child of the Dark |
| The author writes about her life as one of the desperately poor in a Brazilian slum. | |
| Mary Lyons (H. Holt,1995) | 920.7 L995k - Keeping Secrets: the Girlhood Diaries of Seven Women Writers |
| Portions of the diaries of Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Jane Foster, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ida B. Wells appear here. | |
| (Pocket Books,1995) | 940.5318 C437 - Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries |
| Twenty-three young people wrote about what they saw while in hiding or imprisoned in ghettoes or extermination camps. | |
| Dawid Sierakowiak(Oxford University Press,1996) | 940.5318 Si17d - The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto |
| Dawid's diary entries, from age fourteen to eighteen, document the disintegration of his family in the notorious Polish ghetto. | |
| Anne Frank (Doubleday,1967) | 940.53492 F851d - Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl |
| Given a diary for her 13th birthday, Anne faithfully wrote in it while hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. | |
| John Bassett (Archon,1989) | 940.54 B294w - War Journal of an Innocent Soldier |
| An American infantryman posted in Italy during the final days of World War II recorded the final push against the Germans. | |
| Zlata Filipovic (Viking,1994) | 949.7024 F477z - Zlata's Diary |
| Zlata, a Bosnian teen, expressed her thoughts and fears during the year-long siege of Sarajevo. | |
| Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas (University of North Carolina,1990) | 973.7 T3627s - The Secret Eye |
| Begun in 1848, when she was 14, this diary reports a southern belle's life before, during and after the Civil War. | |
Imagined |
|
Author |
Title |
| Brown, Todd | Entries from a Hot Pink Notebook (Washington Square,1995) |
| A high school freshman keeps account of his family's failings, his friends' problems, his gay identity, and his quest for spiritual peace. | |
| Butler, Octavia | Parable of the Sower (Warner,1993) |
| A young woman tracks community destruction and religious rebirth in the 21st century. | |
| Cole, Sheila | What Kind of Love? (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard,1995) |
| A 15-year-old girl reveals her own reactions and those of her friends and family as her unplanned pregnancy develops. | |
| Cushman, Karen | Catherine, Called Birdy (Clarion,1994) |
| In the Middle Ages, a young girl faces her father's demands that she marry a suitor whom she does not want. | |
| Deem, James | 3 NBs of Julian Drew (Houghton Mifflin,1994) |
| An abused boy writes in code about his life. | |
| Denenberg, Barry | 3 When Will This Cruel World Be Over?: the Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson (Scholastic,1996) |
| A fourteen-year-old Virginia girl chronicles her family's losses. | |
| Hamilton, Fritz | Love, Debra (Open Hand,1990) |
| A runaway girl addresses the entries in her diary to her dead mother. | |
| Holmes, Barbara Ware | Letters to Julia (HarperCollins,1997) |
| Encouraged by a friendly editor, Liz channels her frustration with her family into a novel. | |
| Mahon, K.L. | Just One Tear (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard,1993) |
| Frustrated by his inability to see justice done when his father is murdered, a boy keeps a record of his pain. | |
| Marsden, John | So Much to Tell You (Joy Street,1989) |
| A mute Australian girl writes about her traumatic past. | |
| Schami, Rafik | A Hand Full of Stars (Dutton,1987) |
| Set in Damascus, Syria, this German novel explores political repression and rebellion. | |
| Terris, Susan | Nell's Quilt (Farrar Straus Giroux,1987) |
| A teenager in 1899 New England dreams of college but faces the prospect of an arranged marriage instead. | |
| Townsend, Sue | The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (Avon,1985) |
| Adrian's working class London comes to life with the laugh-out-loud scenes he describes in his diary. | |
| Walker, Alice | The Color Purple (Washington Square Press,1983) |
| In her letters to God, Celie describes a life of abuse and her ultimate refusal to be a victim. | |
| Woodson, Jacqueline | From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (Scholastic,1995) |
| A 14-year-old boy uses his journal as a place to vent his feelings about his mother's new relationship. | |
| Zindel, Paul | The Amazing and Death Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman (Harper & Row,1987) |
| Eugene's love life is far from perfect the summer he's 15. | |