Books: An American Record

THE DIARY OF GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG (4 vols.; 2,143 pp.)—Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas—Macmillan '($35).

In 1835 George Templeton Strong, a New York boy of 15, began a diary. In its first few years the diary recorded a gleeful account of student pranks at Columbia, a burlesque of its president's sermon on "The Moral Turpitude of Snow-Balling," a solemn discovery that Shelley's poetry was "rather humbuggical." By the time of Strong's death in 1875, the diary, with a massive total of 4.500,000 words, had become a solid record of 19th century...