Volume IV of The Diary of Anais Nin demonstrates again what a really extraordinary literary and historical value Miss Nin's work has. The years of the middle nineteen-forties find her in a Greenwich Village studio surrounded by young artists. Specifically and generally she battles the Establishment and for a time becomes polarized between involvement with the young-among them Gore Vidal- and with the established order, represented by a man like Edmund Wilson. Once more her friends and acquaintances are vividly sketched, and the portrait of Wilson is unforgettable. We also follow her discovery of America, in the summer of 1947, when she makes her way in an old Ford to the West Coast and, eventually, to Mexico. The themes are self-discovery, the individual in a hostile environment, and the openness of youth versus the calcifications of "maturity." As Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times has said, the Diary is "one of the most candid records drawn by a writer in the 20th century. That this writer is a woman makes it even more relevant."
