The Diary of Anais Nin is the publication of the real manuscript diary of Anais Nin, hence the title. Nin started the diary at the age of 11 in 1914 while on a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. She started it initially as a letter to her father who abandoned her family prior, but it soon grew into something much more. She confided in it and it became something that she could not function without. It became her friend, her best friend, and an extension of herself. Her mother, therapists, and writers tried to get Nin to abandon the hobby, to rid herself of the diary altogether. But Nin refused, not complying with the demands of her superiors. She continued the diary until her very last days, concluding with her death in 1977.
Nin wrote, and she wrote a lot. By the end of her life, she crafted over 15,000 typewritten pages of diary throughout her lifetime. But long before her death, she sought a publisher for her work. She wanted the world to see what she went through and all her life experiences and thoughts. However, because of the informal quality and extreme quantity, it was very difficult to find someone willing to publish them. After some 30 years of searching for a way to share her diaries, she eventually found a publisher in 1966, successfully publishing her first volume which covered the years 1931 to 1934 of her life. She would eventually publish six more volumes of her diary. This is very little, however, compared to the 150 odd volumes she actually produced but never published.
Nin’s work became very popular in the 1960s among young women of the time. It’s important to consider that during the 60s there was little to no technological advances in society, so reading was the biggest past time for people, particularly women who stayed home and did not actively participate in other activities. Nin became known as a feminist of her age and was widely appraised by her audience.
The diaries that were published in the 1966s and onward are considered the “expurgated diaries” because they are the edited and “filtered” versions. The “unexpurgated” diaries are more “sexually frank” and are more blunt about what some may consider sensitive topics. However, in 1986 the more “sexually frank” diaries were published to the public as a more raw and “real” accompaniment to the originally published volumes.
