In 1982, the sculptor Anne Truitt published Daybook, an informal account of her work and life during a period of seven years, from 1974 through 1980. Truitt, who’s now sixty-six years old, described her marriage and her divorce, her three grown kids, her house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., her money worries, teaching jobs, and days in the studio, where she makes the slender, luxuriantly colored, four-sided columns which have been exhibited at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York and in one-person shows at the Whitney Museum and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. To judge from Daybook, Truitt has led a more conventionally middle-class American life than most artists who have “serious” New York reputations; but then the interest of Daybook, which had a succès d’estime and meant something special to many artists, lies in Truitt’s ability to show us just how strange and serendipitous a conjunction of bits and pieces an artist’s life really is. Though Truitt’s professional good fortune, much of which stems from the praise of Clement Greenberg, is more than most can ever hope for, her career is like many others—a combination of hard work, some deep kind of self-confidence, and a few interventions by the guardian angel.

Truitt has now published a second volume, Turn, which begins with her feelings upon the publication of Daybook.[1]In tone it’s much like the first book, but the diary entries, which cover a period of about two and