LoC Blog: World War I - An American Soldier’s Journey Home

For its commemoration of the centennial of the First World War, Library of Congress staff invited me to write a new play based on the life of Irving Greenwald, a World War I soldier. Greenwald’s diary is preserved by the Library’s Veterans History Project and is currently on view in the exhibition Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I.
Irving Greenwald left 465 days of diary entries, and I set out to read all of them. Luckily, since Greenwald’s diary had been digitized, the process was simple—much easier than my last project, “The American Soldier.” That play is based on letters written by veterans from the American Revolution all the way through current-day Afghanistan, and took eight years to research and write. I located individual letters, mostly at the New York Public Library, photocopied passages from those I found especially compelling, then sorted and transcribed them before fleshing them out into monologues. ... [mehr] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/03/world-war-i-an-american-soldiers-journey-home/

Pages from Irving Greenwald’s diary dated Sept. 25 and 26, 1918. The diary is pocket size, compelling Greenwald to write in very small script.