The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1944–1947

Success, when it finally came, arrived at an angle. The Wilson review made Nin a name; the names it drew were the young — students, poets, and veterans just back, for whom the diary legend and the Paris pedigree made her an oracle. The volume's most storied friendship is with Gore Vidal, twenty and precocious, then an editor at Dutton: the alliance carried her from the Gemor Press to a commercial house, and its later souring — conducted in novels and memoirs on both sides — became one of the era's running feuds. Here it is at its warm beginning.

The professional story is the volume's spine: This Hunger printed on her own press in 1945, then Ladders to Fire from Dutton in 1946, the continuous novel launched at last, and the reviews arriving with the mixture of awe and bafflement that would follow the sequence for decades. The diary keeps its own ledger throughout — what the public versions of her were costing the private one — and closes with Nin doing what she always did at a chapter's end: getting moving.

New York, 1944–1947: the Glass Bell aftermath and the second printing; the young circle assembling — Vidal, the poets, the analysands of her legend; the Dutton years and the launch of the continuous novel; Provincetown and Long Island interludes; and the diary's running argument with American literary culture, which wanted her story more than her sentences. The volume ends westward: the first long drive across the country, and the discovery of the other coast that would divide the rest of her life.