The Diary of a Nobody the first, "The Diary of a Somebody", is a direct reference to the Grossmith original. Reviewing this volume in "The Spectator", Benny Green points out several parallels with the original, in both character and event. Matthew's book, says Green, is amusing, but the Grossmiths' book is superior; it is "affecting as well as comical, in a way that the Matthew pastiche is not". In 1982 came the first appearance of Sue Townsend's teenage creation, Adrian Mole, whose passage into young manhood and early middle age is charted in a long series of diaries. The more middle-aged he becomes, says Morton,
The Diary of a Public Man attempts to understand what was going through Lincoln’s mind as he took office and as he made the fateful decisions leading to war is bound to find the Diary intriguing. But two key questions hang over the Diary. Who wrote it? And was it genuine? The editor of the "North American Review" concealed the identity of its author, and historians have found it difficult to crack the secret. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff’s influential reference work, The Modern Researcher, singles out the Diary for presenting the "most gigantic" problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing. In part because