The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Under the pen name W. N. P. Barbellion, the young English naturalist Bruce Frederick Cummings kept a diary of extraordinary candor, tracking his passion for wildlife, his literary ambitions, his marriage, and the slow, cruel advance of the illness that would kill him before thirty. He called the book ‘a study in the nude,’ and it earns the phrase. By turns witty, vain, tender, and despairing, it hides nothing about the mind of a man watching his own body fail. H. G. Wells supplied an introduction, and early readers were startled by an entry announcing the author’s death. Few diaries capture so honestly the will to live pressed against the certainty of dying. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.