A month before John Wayne won the 1969 Best Actor Oscar for “True Grit,” Richard Nixon wrote him a “Dear Duke” fan letter from the Oval Office: “I saw it in the W.H. with my family and for once we agree with the critics — you were great!” Some four decades later, his rave was echoed by another Republican warrior, this time in praise of the “True Grit” remake with Jeff Bridges in the role of the old, fat, hard-drinking, half-blind 19th-century United States marshal Rooster Cogburn. Shortly after New Year’s, Liz Cheney told The Times that her parents saw “True Grit” at the Teton Theater in Jackson, Wyo., and gave it “two thumbs up.”

The double-barreled success of “True Grit,” then and now, spreads well beyond those conservative gunslingers. In our current winter of high domestic anxiety, as in the politically tumultuous American summer of 1969, it is a hit with the national mass audience and elite critics alike. The new version is doing as well in New York and Los Angeles as in red Cheneyland.

That “True Grit” still works is first a testament to the beauty of the remake, as directed by the Coen brothers, and to the enduring power of both films’ source, a 1968 novel by Charles Portis that refracted a Western yarn through a scintillating and original comic voice. But the latest “True Grit” juggernaut also has something to say about Americans yearning at a trying juncture in our history — much as it did the first time around.

The original film opened at Radio City Music Hall on July 3, 1969, the same day that antiwar protestors incited a melee at the adjoining Rockefeller Center, shutting down Fifth Avenue. In that climate, the movie’s success was hardly foreordained. The previous year, “The Green Berets,” Wayne’s jingoistic Vietnam potboiler, had divided audiences, been ridiculed by the press and shunned by the Oscars. The Western, like the war movie, was seen as a dying genre, usurped by darker and ever more violent takes on frontier mythology like the 1967 “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch,” which opened just a week before “True Grit.” July of ’69 would also bring “Easy Rider,” the iconic ’60s dope-and-biker movie in which Dennis Hopper, who played a villain in “True Grit,” would reinvent himself as an era’s archetypal cultural antihero. The “Easy Rider” ad copy ran: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.”

Such was the dyspeptic mood of a nation deep into a fruitless war and a year after a summer of assassinations and riots. Yet “True Grit” was warmly received, including by the Times critic, Vincent Canby, who put it in a year-end list of bests dominated by such antiestablishment fare as “The Wild Bunch,” “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy” (that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner) and the ultimate anti-Western, Andy Warhol’s sexually transgressive “Lonesome Cowboys.” Canby described “True Grit” as “a classic frontier fable that manages to be most entertaining even when it’s being most reactionary.”

He was right. Its story and themes could hardly have been more retro. A 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Ark., named Mattie Ross hires Rooster to help track down an outlaw who murdered both her father and a Texas state senator before fleeing into Choctaw territory. Though Mattie is a stickler for the law, she’s not averse to frontier justice if that’s required to avenge her dad. But to the grizzled old Rooster’s dismay, the girl insists on joining him on the trail to make sure the job gets done.

Like classic Hollywood Westerns before it, “True Grit” in all its iterations has an elegiac lilt. Uncivilized hired guns like Rooster may have helped tame the West and dispatched bad guys, but they were also capable of lawlessness and atrocities. As a young Confederate soldier, Rooster had joined in the 1863 Lawrence, Kan., massacre. Ultimately, law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage — which Rooster failed at — had to prevail if America was to grow up. The Matties had to outlive the Roosters. And so they did. For a weary mainstream 1969 audience, and not just a reactionary one, the restoration of order in “True Grit,” inevitably to be followed by Rooster’s ride off into the sunset, was a heartening two-hour escape from the near-civil-war raging beyond the theater’s walls.

In 2010, expectations for the new “True Grit” may have been lower than they were for the first. The Western has once again been written off as an endangered species. The Coens’ critically admired filmmaking has never generated blockbuster box office. An added indignity was the complete shutout of “True Grit” from Golden Globe nominations — a measure of a movie’s advance buzz, if nothing else.

Nonetheless, it is already the biggest draw of any Coen brothers film — poised to at least double the business of “No Country for Old Men,” their biggest previous hit. Revealingly, I think, it is attracting an even larger audience than “The Social Network,” a movie of equal quality with reviews to match and more timely cultural cachet. It turns out that “True Grit” is as much an escape for Americans now as it was in the Vietnam era.

Our age is hardly identical to that one, whatever the resonances between the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars, and whatever our own bouts of domestic violence. The new “True Grit” took off before the Tucson cataclysm in any event, and the movie’s broad appeal, like the demographics of its audience, transcends our running right-left debate. What is most stirring about “True Grit” today — besides the primal father-daughter relationship that blossoms between Rooster and Mattie — is its unalloyed faith in values antithetical to those of the 21st century America so deftly skewered, as it happens, in “The Social Network.”

At its core, the new “True Grit” is often surprisingly similar to the first, despite the clashing sensibilities of their directors (Henry Hathaway, a studio utility man, did the original) and the casting of an age-appropriate Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) in lieu of the 21-year-old Kim Darby of 1969. But what leaps out this time, to the point of seeming fresh, is the fierce loyalty of the principal characters to each other (the third being a vain Texas Ranger, played by Matt Damon) and their clear-cut sense of morality and justice, even when the justice is rough. More than the first “True Grit,” the new one emphasizes Mattie’s precocious, almost obsessive preoccupation with the law. She is forever citing law-book principles, invoking lawyers and affidavits, and threatening to go to court. “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another,” says Mattie. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.”

That kind of legal and moral cost-accounting seems as distant as a tintype now. The new “True Grit” lands in an America that’s still not recovered from a crash where many of the reckless perpetrators of economic mayhem deflected any accountability and merely moved on to the next bubble, gamble or ethically dubious backroom deal. When Americans think of the law these days, they often think of a system that can easily be gamed by the rich and the powerful, starting with those who pillaged Lehman Brothers, A.I.G. and Citigroup and left taxpayers, shareholders and pensioners in the dust. A virtuous soul like Mattie would be crushed in a contemporary gold rush even if (or especially if) she fought back with the kind of civil action so prized by the 19th-century Mattie.

Talk about Two Americas. Look at “The Social Network” again after seeing “True Grit,” and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley. While “Social Network” fictionalizes Mark Zuckerberg, it mines the truth of an era — from the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system to the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue at the top of that economic pyramid.

In contrast to Mattie’s dictum, no one has to pay for any transgression in the world it depicts. Zuckerberg’s antagonists, Harvard classmates who accuse him of intellectual theft, and his allies, exemplified by a predatory venture capitalist, sometimes seem more entitled and ruthless than he is. The blackest joke in Aaron Sorkin’s priceless script is that Lawrence Summers, a Harvard president who would later moonlight as a hedge fund consultant, might intervene to arbitrate any ethical conflicts. You almost wish Rooster were around to get the job done.

“The Social Network” is nothing if not the true sequel to “Wall Street.” The director, David Fincher (no less brilliant than the Coens), makes the atmosphere almost as murky and poisonous as that of his serial killer movies, “Seven” and “Zodiac.” In “Social Network,” the landscape is Cambridge, Mass., but we might as well be in the pre-civilized Wild West. Instead of thieves bearing guns, we have thieves bearing depositions. Instead of actual assassinations, we have character assassinations by blog post. In place of an honorable social code, we have a social network presided over by a post-adolescent billionaire whose business card reads “I’m CEO … Bitch!”

This hits too close to home. No one should have been surprised that those looking for another America once again have been finding it in “True Grit.”

CAIRO — Egypt’s most powerful and proscribed opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, has decided that it will not participate in an antigovernment demonstration this week for a curious reason: The protest conflicts with a national holiday honoring the police.

“We should all be celebrating together,” said Essam el-Erian, a senior member of the group, offering an explanation that seemed more in line with government thinking than that of an outlawed Islamist organization whose members are often jailed.

That type of calculation, intended to avoid a direct confrontation with the state, is helping build momentum, many here say, for a political evolution — in Egypt and around the region — where calls for change are less and less linked to a particular ideology like Islamism. Instead, analysts and activists say the forces that brought people to the streets in Tunisia and excited passions across the Middle East are far more fundamental and unifying: concrete demands to end government corruption, institute the rule of law and ease economic suffering.

This is a relatively nascent development in a society like Egypt, which has been depoliticized over the past three decades of President Hosni Mubarak’s one party, authoritarian rule, experts said. But the shift seems to be striking fear in the country’s leadership, which has successfully pacified opposition by oppressing those it cannot co-opt, but which remains anxious about the prospect of a popular revolt, political analysts and activists said.

“Ideology now has taken a back seat until we can get rid of this nightmare confronting everyone,” said Megahed Melligi, 43, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who said he quit the group three years ago out of frustration. “This nightmare is the ruling party and the current regime. This is everyone’s nightmare.”

In 1979, the Iranian revolution introduced the Muslim world to the force of political Islam, which frightened entrenched leaders, as well as the West. That ideology still has a powerful hold on people’s imaginations across the region, which continues to feed fighters to jihadist movements. But like Arabism and socialism before it, the political Islam of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran and the radicalized ideology of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have failed to deliver in practical ways for the millions of people across the Middle East who live in bastions of autocratic rule.

That failure — and now the unexpected success of Tunisians in bringing down their government — appears to be at the heart of a political recalculation among some about how best to effect change in the Arab world. The Tunisians were joined together by anger at oppression and corruption rather than any overarching philosophy.

Even before the Tunisian revolution, Egyptian activists from the both sides of the political spectrum had been increasingly pointing not to Iran’s revolution as a model, but to Turkey’s method of governance, where an Islamic party runs a modern, democratic and accountable state.

One of the groups planning to demonstrate on Police Day, which calls itself the April 6th Youth Movement, emphasizes its absence of ideology in its description on its Web site: “Nothing brings us together except our love for this country and the desire to reform it.”

Abdel-Halim Qandil, a leader in another protest movement, which calls itself Kifaya, or Enough, said: “People in the West are talking about the religious ‘threat.’ They don’t understand what kind of hell we are in right now. The country is congested and people are unable to confront the regime.”

While Tunisia is a far more secularized society than other Arab states, its citizens’ demands are the same as those being heard in many nations in the region, even those rich in oil wealth like Kuwait. There are many places thick with disillusionment over the failure of formal political parties and organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm in Jordan and the traditional opposition parties in Egypt, which have failed to deliver change.

“This is exactly what the Tunisian case shows us,” said Emad Shahin an Egyptian scholar at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “It’s not the age of ideology anymore. This concern about ideology and certain political orientations of Islamism is really over. There are more pressing issues that all the players, including the Islamists, are interested in now and have to deal with.”

This is not to say that formal organizations, especially the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have lost their influence or their followers. Although the group has been outlawed by the state, it has a broad network of social services around the country, which the government tolerates, and an ability to bring armies of supporters out — if it chooses to.

But the movement’s leaders are from a generation that focuses foremost on survival, which means avoiding confrontation with the state, political analysts said. And that position which has alienated some of its younger members. “The ones who are there and working without calculating every little thing are the youth,” Mr. Melligi said. “They have nothing to lose. They don’t have headquarters and organizational structures for the government to target.”

Another unexpected element thrust into the region by the rush of events in Tunisia has been the emergence of self-immolation as a symbol of the nonideological political dynamics. The revolution in Tunisia started with just such a desperate act — when a young food vendor burned himself to death after the police confiscated his wares and humiliated him. The practice has since spread across northern Africa and in the Middle East. A man in Saudi Arabia died after self-immolating on Saturday in the first case of its kind in the country. In Egypt, at least five men have set themselves ablaze, or tried to.

The government seems keenly aware of the power that the image of a person engulfed in flames carries, and its potential to accomplish what the mainstream opposition has been unable to: transforming widespread discontent into a collective call for political change. The government has ordered gas stations not to sell to individuals who are not in vehicles, instructed prayer leaders to remind worshipers that suicide is a sin and stationed security agents, who were armed with fire extinguishers, outside government offices.

The first Egyptian to burn himself last week did so in front of government offices in the center of Cairo, pouring a gallon of gasoline over his head and lighting a match. He most likely would have died had security agents not used a fire extinguisher on him.

The story of the Egyptian man, Abdo Abdel-Moneim Hamadah, is strikingly similar to that of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young food vendor from Tunisia who killed himself. Mr. Hamadah had a small sandwich shop in Ismailia. The government bureaucracy suddenly denied him access to a monthly allowance of cheap, state-subsidized bread. After he set himself on fire, the government-controlled media said he was suicidal over that issue.

A relative said, however, that his protest was not about bread but dignity, the same intangible that drove Mr. Bouazizi to light himself on fire and that the governments here and around the region have yet to redress. The relative said Mr. Hamadah snapped after a government official agreed to give him back the bread, not because he was entitled to it, but as charity.

“They spoke to him like he was a beggar,” said the relative, who spoke anonymously for fear of government retribution. After Mr. Hamadah burned himself, the relative said, the government turned over the cheap bread.

“He got his rights,” the relative said. That, he said, was all Mr. Hamadah had been seeking.

Reynolds Price, whose novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction, died on Thursday in Durham, N.C. He was 77.

The cause was complications of a heart attack, his brother, Will, said. For many years Mr. Price had lived as a paraplegic after receiving radiation treatment for a spinal tumor, about which he wrote in “A Whole New Life” (1994).

Few writers have made as dramatic an entrance on the American literary stage as Mr. Price, who published his first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” in 1962 to near-universal acclaim for its pungent Southern dialogue, highly wrought prose style and vivid evocation of rural Southern life.

The novel — the tale of Rosacoke Mustian, a young woman desperate to clarify her relationship with an untamable boyfriend, Wesley Beavers — inspired critics to welcome Mr. Price as the brightest literary talent to emerge since the Southern Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. In an extraordinary vote of confidence, Harper’s Magazine published the novel in its entirety as a supplement.

“He is the best young writer this country has ever produced,” the novelist Allan Gurganus said in an interview for this obituary. “He started out with a voice, a lyric gift and a sense of humor, and an insight about how people lived and what they’ll do to get along.”

Mr. Price staked his claim as a writer to watch with the novel’s bravura opening sentence, a paragraph-long curlicue that began, “Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers.”

“Some beginning — of a book, of a career,” the critic Theodore Solotaroff wrote in Saturday Review in 1970. “Its sheer virtuosity is like that of a quarterback who on the first play of his first professional game throws a 60-yard pass on the run, hitting the receiver exactly at the instant he breaks into the clear; a tremendous assertion of agility, power, timing and accuracy.”

His story collection “The Names and Faces of Heroes,” published a year later, made it clear that “A Long and Happy Life” was no fluke.

Except for three years he spent in Britain as a graduate student at Merton College, Oxford, Mr. Price lived all his life in northeastern North Carolina, and he would work his home ground in 13 novels and dozens of short stories. Inevitably he drew comparisons to William Faulkner, much to his annoyance, since he regarded himself as a literary heir to Eudora Welty.

He also published poetry, plays, essays, translations from the Bible and three volumes of memoirs. With “A Whole New Life,” he attracted a new audience of admirers.

At Duke University, where he taught writing and the poetry of Milton for more than half a century, he encouraged students like Anne Tyler and Josephine Humphreys. Simply by staying in the South and writing about it, he inspired a generation of younger Southern novelists.

“He made this small corner of North Carolina the sovereign territory of his own imagination and showed those of us who went away that the water back home was fine,” Mr. Gurganus said. “We could come back; there was plenty of room for all of us.”

Edward Reynolds Price was born on Feb. 1, 1933, in Macon, N.C., a town about 65 miles northeast of Raleigh that he once described as “227 cotton and tobacco farmers nailed to the flat red land at the pit of the Great Depression.”

The family, struggling financially, moved from one house to another in nearby towns, but Reynolds, their first child, benefited from the doting attention of cousins, aunts and uncles — all of them, it seemed, gifted storytellers. His early life provided the material for the memoir “Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides” (1989). Mr. Price later said of his native county: “I’m the world’s authority on this place. It’s the place about which I have perfect pitch.”

His brother, of Raleigh, is his only immediate survivor.

Mr. Price enrolled at Duke University, where Eudora Welty read one of his stories, “Michael Egerton,” and volunteered to show it to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, who took the young writer on as a client.

After graduating summa cum laude from Duke in 1955, he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, where he wrote a thesis on Milton, and developed career-enhancing friendships with the poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden and the critic and biographer Lord David Cecil. He wrote about his years in Britain in the third installment of his memoirs, “Ardent Spirits” (2009).

Spender published the story “A Chain of Love” in the journal Encounter, a coup for Mr. Price, who was also offered a teaching position at Duke when he returned. He was turned down for military service after he stated, without hesitation, that he was homosexual.

His first class included a promising 16-year-old named Anne Tyler. “I can still picture him sitting tailor-fashion on top of his desk, reading to the class from his own work or from one of his students’ papers,” Ms. Tyler wrote in an e-mail. “He seemed genuinely joyous when we did the slightest thing right.”

With his second novel, “A Generous Man” (1966), Mr. Price continued the story of the Mustian clan, to which he would return much later in the 1988 novel “Good Hearts.” He later confounded critics with “The Surface of Earth” (1975), an ambitious multigenerational chronicle of the Mayfield family, related by a well-educated, complex narrator much like the author himself.

Self-consciously grand, “The Surface of Earth” was the first part of a trilogy called “A Great Circle.” A sequel, “The Source of Light,” followed in 1981. Mr. Price completed the series with “The Promise of Rest” in 1995.

Critics divided sharply on the more intricate middle novels, whose prose struck many as mannered. “His interest in Milton is not accidental or incidental,” Ms. Humphreys said in an interview. “He has the same fascination with the art of language that that great Baroque poet had. His fiction is word-intense, complex and fancy. But he can take that and combine it with Southern plain talk.”

In 1984 Mr. Price discovered that a thin eight-inch malignant tumor called an astrocytoma had wrapped itself around his spinal column just below the neck. Several operations and aggressive radiation therapy to neutralize what he called “the gray eel” left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Despite years of physical torment, Mr. Price entered into a remarkably fecund phase as a writer. “Previously I’d averaged a book every two years at least, so I was hardly a great tree sloth, but I’d always said truthfully that writing was hard for me, very hard, and now it’s not,” he told The Paris Review in 1991.

Hypnosis therapy, intended to relieve his pain, released a flood of childhood memories that Mr. Price funneled into “Clear Pictures” and “The Tongues of Angels” (1990), which was based on his time as a camp counselor in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Most important, Mr. Price completed “Kate Vaiden” (1986). Narrated by a 57-year-old North Carolina woman whose lifelong search for love and security has been a series of bitter setbacks, the novel won back many of the critics who were beginning to cool on Mr. Price. It won the National Book Critics Circle prize as the year’s best work of fiction.

“Blue Calhoun” (1992), cast as a long letter from the title character to his granddaughter, was also warmly received. The morally shifty but likable narrator, like the lively, irrepressible Kate Vaiden, won readers over.

The undercurrent of Christian charity evident in Mr. Price’s previous work became even more pronounced in these and later novels, like “Roxanna Slade” (1998) and “The Good Priest’s Son” (2005), in which fallible characters face momentous moral choices. The deepening moral tinge, which some critics found too schematic, was rooted in Mr. Price’s Christian faith: he was an unorthodox, nonchurchgoing believer.

“The whole point of learning about the human race presumably is to give it mercy,” he told The Georgia Review in 1993.

If Mr. Price shook off the burden of Faulkner, his work remained elusive despite its strong regional flavor and commitment to “the weight and worth of the ordinary,” as the novelist Janet Burroway once put it. Mr. Price himself ventured a succinct appraisal for The Southern Review in 1978: “It seems to me they are books about human freedom — the limits thereof, the possibilities thereof, the impossibilities thereof.”

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

“I have tried to keep diaries before,” John Steinbeck writes in a giant ledger book filled with his methodical script, “but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.”

This particular journal, on display at the Morgan Library & Museum in a compelling exhibition that opened on Friday, “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” has such a modest goal — chronicling Steinbeck’s work on “The Grapes of Wrath” — that it probably does not bend the truth too much. But spend some time with these diaries, intelligently culled from the Morgan’s archives by Christine Nelson, the museum’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, and you see how fervently the keepers of journals labor to shape accounts of themselves.

These diaries span more than the three centuries of the exhibition’s subtitle. They are the chronicles of the famous (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and obscure (Adèle Hugo, Victor’s daughter); royalty (Queen Victoria recounting her journeys in the Highlands) and pirates (Bartholomew Sharpe, who preyed on the Spanish in the 17th century); and child writers (J. P. Morgan as a 9-year-old) and writers for children (E. B. White, who used his own diaries as a sometime source). Bob Dylan’s 1973-74 travel journal of his tour with the Band is opened to his sketch of a view from a Memphis hotel room; Einstein’s 1922 travel diary is open to calculations related to electromagnetism and general relativity, written on the page’s flip side.

The variety is dizzying. The diaries are written in bound volumes (like Sir Walter Scott’s) or relegated to a scratch pad (like an account of the 9/11 attacks by Steven Mona, a New York City police lieutenant). They are energetically scribbled (like Henry David Thoreau’s, written with pencils made by his family’s own company — a packet is on display) or crazily compressed into nearly microscopic print (like the fantastical reaction to a dark and stormy night by a young Charlotte Brontë). All of these are astonishing presentations, confessions, performances — often self-conscious and, perhaps, occasionally honest.

Our own era, of course, has turned spontaneous journalizing into something of a fetish, as 140-character tweets supposedly spring spontaneously from the thumbs of celebrities; scores of electronic walls sprout on which “friends” post tirelessly about their socially networked activities; and blogs are tossed into the electronic ether like rolled-up notes floating in virtual bottles. And though far less distinguished, the contemporary mix of self-invention, self-promotion and self-revelation is probably not that different from what is on display here.

The pioneers of the well-shaped self are represented by the first printed edition of St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” from the 15th century, and by the first printed edition of that book’s 18th-century secular heir, Rousseau’s “Confessions” — narratives that are meticulously shaped to make certain points and stake certain claims. More valuable for straightforward reportage is Samuel Pepys’ 17th-century account of the Great Fire of London, seen here in the corrected proofs of the first edition of his diaries, along with a single sheet showing the shorthand that he used to encode 3,000 handwritten pages; they were deciphered only after more than a century.

But how are personal secrets, shames and private sensations treated in these works? Some incorporate secret writing: hieroglyphs in one, mirror writing in another. Adèle Hugo expresses her passionate love using scrambled words in a diary that inspired Truffaut’s film “The Story of Adèle H.,” which will be screened at the Morgan in April in conjunction with this exhibition.

Sometimes the diaries simply avoid anything explicitly self-revelatory. The overwritten, aphoristic first volume of Thoreau’s journals from 1837 may reflect not just his youth (he was born in 1817), but also his avoidance of the personal, with plush Romantic-era language (describing, for example, the shore’s changing scenery as “far reaching and sublime, but ever calm and gently undulating”).

And we probably should accept White’s judgment of his own early journals, which in a transcript of his 1969 interview with The Paris Review, he says are stored in “two-thirds of a whisky carton.”

“They are,” he says, “callow, sententious, moralistic, and full of rubbish.”

But other diarists edit their supposedly spontaneous texts, excising undesirable allusions, cultivating a desired image. A typescript of a volume of Anaïs Nin’s diary, which the author describes as the “uncut version,” is far from it, Ms. Nelson points out: “Nin — like all diarists —crafted the story of her life, choosing the identity she wished to present to her friends, the public and herself.” And a journal that was jointly kept by Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, is shown with passages blacked out by Sophia to keep them from posterity’s glance.

Nevertheless, many diaries on display are almost painful in their confrontations with the recalcitrant reality of their authors’ lives and characters. An enormous volume by the British slaveholder John Newton recounts his spiritual conversion (which led to the composition of the hymn “Amazing Grace” and to his later opposition to slavery), but also his “repeated backslidings”: “I have been reading what I have recorded of my experience in the last year — a strange vanity. I find myself condemnd in every page.”

And a bit playfully, a volume of John Ruskin’s diaries from 1878 shows the heading “February to April, the Dream” above blank pages. They are a deliberate gap this critic left to mark the period of his mental breakdown — a nightmare. Later Ruskin went back over the early parts of his diary, trying to discern his latent symptoms.

Unexpectedly touching is a hastily written series of entries by Tennessee Williams from the 1950s; he was being hailed for his genius even as he languished in loneliness and anxiety, dependent on drugs and alcohol.

“A black day to begin a blue journal,” he writes at the opening of the notebook on display; then an evening’s sexual encounters suggest that a “benign Providence” had “suddenly taken cognizance and pity of my long misery this summer and given me this night as a token of forgiveness.”

Throughout the show, examples of powerful emotions and experience erupt from staid pages. There are also some extraordinary historical documents, including a leather portfolio and diary carried by Napoleon’s surgeon in chief, Dominique Jean Larrey, through the disastrous French campaign in Russia in 1812-13. Napoleon said Larrey was “the finest man I’ve known,” and Tolstoy has him assessing Prince Andrew’s critical injuries in “War and Peace.”

Here Larrey recounts the horrors of battle, describing mothers drowning themselves while embracing their children amid 30,000 dead: “A greater disaster than this has never been seen.”

The diligent visitor will take advantage of the exhibition’s booklet of transcriptions of some of the more cryptic entries, as well as of the tender, insightful audio guide prepared by Ms. Nelson. Over all, more about the sociology of diaries and the fashion for sharing them could perhaps have been explored. And there are things I wish it were possible to see more of, including sections of Sir Walter Scott’s journal that show his gradual loss of language after a series of strokes.

“I am not the man that I was,” he writes. “The plough is coming to the end of the furrow.”

But the exhibition is so rich that it dissatisfies only by being limited. And it has one object that few can have ever seen: a rare pocket-size calendar from 1609 with blank pages treated with coatings of gesso and glue. Using a stylus (no ink required), the owner could keep a diary without worrying about either honesty or secrecy. Instructions are given for treatment after writing: “Take a little peece of Spunge, or a Linnencloath, being cleane without any soyle: wet it in water” and “wipe that you have written very lightly, and it will out, and within one quarter of a hower you may write in the same place againe.” It is the first erasable diary, a Renaissance iPad.