Page 2 | Harper's Magazine

Diaries

Oedipus in Mississippi

By Carol Ruth Silver, from a July 3, 1961, entry in a secret journal of her experiences at the maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in Parchman. One month earlier, the twenty-two-year-old…

A Model Married Man

by George Frost Kennan,

From a 1933 diary entry by George Kennan (1904–2005), with the heading “January, Riga.” Kennan was working for the State Department at the time, in a diplomatic post in Latvia.…

Southern Discomfort

by LeRoy Wiley Gresham,

From the unpublished diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham (1847–65), son of John J. Gresham, twice mayor of Macon, Georgia. LeRoy, a longtime invalid confined to his bed or to a…