This first volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks extends from 1932, when the writer is eight years old, until the late summer of 1941, when the writer, now seventeen, leaves the town where he was born and goes off to Harvard to enter college. It is, in several different ways, a prelude to the many volumes that follow. All the themes that will be developed in rich detail in the following years are already sounded, the attitudes and conflicts that will constitute the dramatic tension in the entire journal are already clearly evident from the first childish scrawls in a five-year diary of a boy of eight to the time, in a hurried and impatient hand, angry and idealistic, a boy of seventeen is con