Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
Saturday December 28 1940 The world’s not going to come back the way it was London is brave somehow burning and huddled in shelters yet walking also in the unlighted streets London is Troy Everyone is wrong nobody is right Berlin is Troy too Paris is fallen Where is Helen Oh world
Contents Preface by Susan Signe Morrison xi 1937 Age 14 1938 Age 15 1939 Age 16 1940 Age 17 1941 Age 18 1942 Age 19 1943 Age 20 Acknowledgments 3 25 91 139 163 225 237 243 Index 245 ix
Preface More than 70 years ago the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 In this book one voice allows us to eavesdrop on what everyday Americans thought and felt about that conflict After my mother Joan Wehlen Morrison died in 2010 my two older brothers and I found hundreds of poems and journal entries she had composed starting from when she was nine years old in 1932 Not seen in seven decades this time capsule allows us to witness the life of a young American girl growing up in Chicago in the wake of the Depression with World War II nearing and later beginning Readers have an abiding interest in normal people’s lives during extraordinary times The great popularity of histori cal fiction period films and even lines of dolls that embody different eras attests to this fact The published diary of a real American girl living in the late 1930s and early 1940s how ever is unique As most of the participants who experienced World War II are aged or dead discovering a fresh voice from that period adds a new dynamic to a time that has long been closed to us Home Front Girl contains a large selection of Joan’s jour nal entries which are identified by date the years 1937 to xi
PREFACE 1943 and ordered chronologically as she ages from 14 to 20 Some journals are missing including her first one and another from September 1939 through November 1940 The ones we found contain much more than what you see here How did I choose which sections to transcribe and make public One of my goals in editing was to include passages I felt were of historical interest but I also picked those that retained Joan’s humor and philosophical outlook And given Joan’s poetic temperament I kept some that were quite simply stylistically beautiful Spelling errors have been corrected though some pre ferred spellings of the era such as faery rather than fairy are left intact Minor style inconsistencies have been stan dardized for ease of reading and some words or lines within individual entries have been cut in the service of concision Joan also used a lot of ellipses I have retained them when she used them to indicate emotional reflection or the passage of time but deleted them if they proved distracting Otherwise the text has been left exactly as Joan wrote it The illustra tions that decorate these pages are Joan’s own In addition to uncovering her diaries we found a great deal of poetry that parallels her personal love life and the war as well as short stories that were written both during and after the war years A small selection of these writings are included here but more can be accessed at www homefront girldiary com This volume contains the reflections of a teenage girl living in a historically fraught time The only daughter of a working-class Swedish immigrant with socialist political con victions and his wife Joan was born in Hinsdale Illinois on December 20 1922 but grew up in Chicago Like many girls xii
