Christine Nelson's blog

The Little Prince, a story of an intergalactic traveler in search of meaningful connection, was published in New York seventy-five years ago today—on April 6, 1943. This guest post is by Adrian Arturo Peña, a student in CUNY’s Language Immersion Program (CLIP), whose class recently visited the Morgan with instructor Gretchen Irwin-Harada to view and discuss Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s draft manuscript and watercolor drawings for The Little Prince.

On March 12, 2018, Amanda Gorman, the twenty-year-old Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, visited the Morgan to place a manuscript of her poem “In This Place (An American Lyric)” in a vitrine in the Morgan’s majestic East Room alongside the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Carson McCullers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Does the physical diary/scrapbook live on in the digital age? Claire Hamilton, a BBC journalist, tells her story.

You may not be able to judge a published book by its cover, but can you judge a diarist by his notebook? Sandrine Lacorie looks at the journal of battlefield physician Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842)

When we're faced with the unfathomable, can keeping a journal or documenting memories help us along?

Before the electronic mobile device, before the blank book, after the wax tablet, how did people take notes? A look at a rare example of a Renaissance erasable pad and its contemporary counterparts.

Author-illustrator Jeff Kinney answers our questions about his hugely popular series Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Even in today’s electronic age, kids delight in making something beautiful and useful with their own hands.

How can we use the diary to practice freedom? Maureen McNeil of the Anne Frank Center USA bears witness to the power of diary-keeping in prisoners’ lives.

As our lives become filled with an endless stream of content and commentary, what is the value of the glaringly blank page?