The most intimate portrait of 17th-century English life ever committed to paper. Samuel Pepys began keeping his diary in 1659, at age 26, writing in a personal shorthand he invented himself, and continued for nearly a decade. What he left behind is nothing less than a miracle of candor: here is a man recording his fears, his lusts, his professional ambitions, his jealousy, his wonder at the Great Fire of London and the Great Plague, his attendance at the first performances of Hamlet under the Restoration stage. Pepys was a naval administrator, a man on the rise, and he documents his world with an observer's hunger and a confessional's ruthlessness. He judges himself constantly, sometimes mercilessly. The diary captures not just the great events of a turbulent decade but the texture of daily existence in London: what people ate, wore, argued about, feared, desired. It is history from the inside out, Filtered through one of English literature's most compulsively readable voices.
