Two Pepys postings in two days. This timely book review explains the importance to the Diarys that will be posted at the site in the post below.

'Samuel Pepys': The Man Behind the Diaries

Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore? Of all the dead white males who used to throng the anthologies and the English lit syllabus, Pepys (1633-1703) is now among the deadest, relegated to footnotes and to trivia questions about the correct pronunciation of his name. (It rhymes with cheeps.) In today's literary climate, there are lots of reasons for benching Pepys -- he was a political chameleon, nasty to the servants, and a serial groper and philanderer -- but the most compelling may be that he's such an anomaly. He comes out of nowhere -- writing only for himself, in a form of his own invention -- and he doesn't lead anywhere either. By the time his work was discovered, a century later, he was a curiosity but not an ''influence.'' Yet the decline in Pepys's reputation only makes Claire Tomalin's engaging new biography all the more remarkable: she not only brings him back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he's more central, more ''relevant,'' than we ever imagined.
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