Snooping Pays Off in The Red Leather Diary

Before Lily Koppel, BC ’03, stumbled upon a 76-year-old diary in the storage room of her Upper West Side apartment, she was a celebrity columnist for The New York Times. But one October morning less than a year after graduating from Barnard, the woman Gawker dubbed the “bravest gossip reporter ever” happened upon the gripping story of a not-so-famous name.

In her new book, The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, published yesterday, Koppel combines the diary entries with interviews, anecdotes, and the story of her own relationship to the journal and its author. This Thursday, Jan. 22, at 7:30 p.m., The Red Leather Diary Paperback Release Party, open to the public, will be held at the 92Y Tribeca Lecture Hall at 200 Hudson Street.

Red Leather Diary reveals the precocious young diarist’s unparalleled enthusiasm for life, art, literature, and music in 1930s Manhattan. Although Koppel had originally arranged to do a piece on the diary for The New York Times, she explained in an interview that she felt the story might merit more extended treatment. “The entire project had a certain cosmic energy attached to it,” she said.

More than three years after discovering the diary, Koppel finally tracked down its author, 93-year-old Florence Howitt, referred to in the diary by her maiden name Florence Wolfson. An anxious and tense Koppell dialed her number, and the two arranged to meet. Howitt and Koppel met for the first time on a Sunday morning in May 2006, at Florence’s Westport, CT home.

Florence Howitt received the diary on her 14th birthday as a gift from her mother’s friend and did not miss a day’s entry for five years. She ran out of pages the day before her 19th birthday. The young girl in the diary was certainly mature for her age—by age 10 she had the IQ of a 15-year-old, and was later rejected from Barnard College because she was deemed “too brilliant and individual.” Howitt loved all things cultural. She even described hosting a literary salon in her parent’s Upper East Side apartment with the likes of soon-to-be great American poets Delmore
Schwartz and John Berryman.

Upon meeting, Howitt and Koppel discovered that they shared many similarities, including “literary flair.” Even though Howitt lived in New York City in the 1930s and Koppel lived in New York City in the 2000s, Koppel claimed that “while technology and overcrowding may diminish traditional ‘ownership’ over the city, the emotions conveyed in the diary, as well as the eternal search for love and meaning, still resonate in today’s Manhattan.”

Both women also have a history in Morningside Heights. Koppel graduated from Barnard in 2003; Howitt obtained her graduate degree in English from Columbia University. In addition to having Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Mark Van Doren, who received his Ph.D from Columbia, as a mentor, Howett attended high-society parties with American literary critic and author Lionel Trilling, who enrolled at Columbia at the age of 16.

According to Koppel, “The Red Leather Diary is a response to our greatest fears of being ordinary; about what it feels like to be young, and most importantly, it [the book] has proved that a single figure can be epic.”

Yet The Red Leather Diary is not just a story about one person, It is also a compelling story of the magical city that unexpectedly brought Koppel and Howitt togeth
er on that cool October morning at 98 Riverside Drive.