CULLED FROM the six volumes of <i>The Diaries of George Washington</i> completed in 1979, this selection of entries chosen by retired Washington Papers editor Dorothy Twohig reveals the lifelong preoccupations of the public and private man.

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Washington was rarely isolated from the world during his eventful life. His diary for 1751-52 relates a voyage to Barbados when he was nineteen. The next two accounts concern the early phases of the French and Indian War, in which Washington commanded a Virginia regiment. By the 1760s when Washington's diaries resume, he considered himself retired from public life, but George III was on the British throne and in the American colonies the process of unrest was beginning that would ultimately place Washington in command of a revolutionary army.

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