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Spotlight Collections

Personal Writings

Have you ever wondered if you could get in the heads of famous people, or see historical moments as they unfold? While we haven’t invented mind reading (or time travel!) we still have the second-best option. These books are the personal thoughts, writings, and impressions of major world players. They are firsthand accounts of events that have been reduced to dates and facts. So dive in, and hear it from the people who lived it!  

This reading list provides you with some collections of books that are currently available through Kinlaw Library. This list is not exhaustive of our collection, but is intended to provide some recommended titles. Consider this your encouragement to experience something new this year! If you know of additional resources we should add to our collection, please click "Suggest a Book" on the right-hand menu and let us know.

Book Gallery: books that are part of our Personal Writings Collection

Revolution on My Mind
The Letters of Mary Penry
The Sarashina Diary
Diary 1954
Another Year Finds Me in Texas
Coleridge's Notebooks
Letters from Joseon
Journals
Letters from Clara
Wanted--Correspondence
The Correspondence of John Cotton
The Karamazov Correspondence
Intimate Letters
My Diary
The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur
Pliny the Younger
Lost Letters from Vienna
Michael Oakeshott: Notebooks, 1922-86
Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 12
Thomas Jefferson
Letters from Langston
Diary

Print Books

We have a copy of each title listed below in our physical collection in Kinlaw Library. This is only a small sampling of our collection, so check out our catalog for additional reading. Come in to the library to check out a title below from our Spotlight Display or you can Request a Hold to pick up your books on the go.

  • Selected Letters, Wesley   
  • The Diary of Beatrice Webb, by Beatrice Webb
  • Prison Diaries, by Kuzentsov 
  • The Notebooks, by Da Vinci 
  • Diary of an Arctic Year, by Krasemann 
  • The Life and Letters, by Darwin
  • Drawings from his Private Albums, by Goya  
  • Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, by Byrd  
  • Letters, Wesley 
  • The Letters and Diaries, by Schlemmer,
  • Diary of an Art Dealer, by Rene Gimpel  
  • New Beethoven Letters, by Beethoven 
  • Letters, by Chopin 
  • The Diaries of Tckhaikovsy, by Tchaikovsky   
  • Hitchock’s Notebooks, by Hitchcock 
  • Letters, by Emily Dickinson
  • Mark Twain’s Letters, by Mark Twain  
  • New Shelly Letters, by Percy Bysshy Shelly
  • Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Dorothy Wordsworth  
  • Commonplace Book, by Forster  
  • All My Road Before Me, by Lewis  
  • Early Letters, by Sir Thomas More 
  • Letters, by C. S. Lewis 
  • Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path, by Woolf 
  • Letters, by Petrarch 
  • Select Letters, by Cicero
  • The Diary of a Russian Censor, by Nikitenko   
  • Tolstoy’s Letters, by Tolstoy 
  • Letters, by Turgenev  
  • Selected Letters, by Anton Chekhov  
  • The Gold Rush Diary, by Perkins 
  • Diary of My Travels in America, by King Louis Philippe
  • Commitment and Sacrifice, by Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee 
  • The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank 
  • A Diary of Darkness, by Kiyosawa
  • Early Letters, by Queen Victoria
  • Dark and Bloody Ground, by Perez Lopez   
  • No Words to Say Goodbye, by Kopelnitsky  
  • Bluegrass Confederate, by Guerrant  
  • The Great Depression, by Roth 
  • White House Diary, by Carter  
  • A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky, by Peter  

E-Books

Our e-books are not available for download, but can be viewed with any device that can open a PDF reader. You can print or download a set of pages from each book to read offline if you desire. You can view our e-book collection to search for additional titles.