The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Within these pages is the private journal of W. N. P. Barbellion. Commenced in youth as the daily record of an ambitious naturalist, the diary alters its course upon the author’s contraction of a severe and lingering illness. The focus of his observation shifts inevitably inward, resulting in an account of absolute candour, which Barbellion himself termed a ‘study in the nude.’

His entries reveal a fierce intelligence and a persistent vein of humour, uniting a keen appetite for life with a steady, unsentimental contemplation of his own mortality. Edited for the press by the author's own hand in 1917, it is presented here simply as the exact and intimate record of a singular human experience.