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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Public Domain Diaries and Journals from Literature and History

 
 
Tom Coates
17:19 / 07.09.02
I'm currently working on a project that's still kind of in the conceptual stages at the moment. It involves texts that closely resemble diaries or journals. What I'm specifically looking for is a text that's in the public domain and is either a novel or piece of fiction explicitly in the form of a diary or is a historical artefact that takes that form. Ideally it would have been quite a chronologically dense work - something that takes place over the course of a few months to a year ideally (hence Samuel Pepys isn't ideal) with regular entries (every day or every few days) and of a length that is manageable. Does anyone have any ideas about potential works I could use?
 
 
Tom Coates
17:31 / 07.09.02
Hmm. Thinking about it more thoroughly, letters might be equally useful for this project..
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
20:02 / 07.09.02
If letters are all right, there are surely hundreds of public-domain texts which would be suitable - sometimes it seems to me that practically everything written before 1800 was epistolary... Evelina by Fanny Burney springs to mind, though there are loads of others in a similar vein - Pamela is another. Do you actually have to read and like reading the texts? Or there's The Diary of a Nobody - I think that spans a year or so.

You might find something that will suit your purpose by looking in an anthology of diaries - a good one is The Assassin's Cloak, or I think there's a Faber anthology along similar lines. I can't think off-hand of a suitable historical diary - they tend to span more time - but there is probably something out there.
 
 
Tom Coates
20:41 / 07.09.02
It's very important that it's out of copyright. Are the Faber versions public domain?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
07:26 / 09.09.02
Bearing in mind that anything written by someone who has been dead for over 70 years *should be* public domain (barring certain estates), some of them certainly should be - anything in Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics or Everyman is going to be public domain, though watch out for translations.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:03 / 09.09.02
I keep thinking that Anne Frank should be out of copyright, and that's ideal, but I don't really know how to find out about that...
 
 
sleazenation
08:05 / 09.09.02
is "dracula" under copyright?
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
09:35 / 09.09.02
Depends; if the book's been kept in print in a particular edition, then *that edition* will probably be still in copyright. However, I think if you have a look at some of Project Gutenberg's texts, you'll find public-domain versions - there's some stuff there that would fit your needs, I think.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:21 / 09.09.02
I've spent ages in Project Gutenberg, and I can't find anything even vaguely useful except for the diaries of Samuel Pepys, and they're just a bit ... long ...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:03 / 09.09.02
Anne Frank is definitely still in copyright unless special arrangements have been made for her estate (and her father's - I bet the copyright was his after her death) - and English editions will be partly copyright her translator as well. Dracula is out of copyright. Re: editions: the introduction and notes will be copyright, the text shouldn't be...
 
 
grant
18:44 / 09.09.02
Dracula rocks, yeh.

I wonder if The Screwtape Letters (CS Lewis) is fair game... probably not. I'm sure Henry James wrote something similar.

Letters from the Earth (Mark Twain) might be a good one (although there are no dates on it).

There are more ideas here - I think Goethe's "Young Werner" might be the best. I haven't actually read it, but an old roommate of mine told me about it - apparently, the book triggered a wave of suicides across Europe when it came out. Sort of a 19th century German "Catcher in the Rye."
Here's another list - I wouldn't trust the dates, since they say Goethe was writing in the 1970s.