The Diary Of Opal Whiteley

Born around the turn of the century, Opal Whiteley spent her childhood on the American Western frontier. Through these excerpts from her diary, readers are given a taste of the struggle and despair as well as the faith and joy felt in each moment of her life. An IRA Teacher's Choice Book. 6/97.

Self-published book of poems by a young author whose childhood diary had caused a sensation three years earlier upon its publication in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in spring 1920, and subsequently as a book. Whiteley's childhood record of growing up in the woods in a logging town in Oregon was painstakingly pieced back together from its torn fragments and is still controversial as to its true origins. Shortly after publication, it was claimed that she wrote the diary as an adult, not a child, and it was branded a hoax. She died in a mental hospital in London in 1992 where she had been institutionalized since 1948.

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