This book contains the private papers of Harry S. Truman, in and out of the White House, beginning in 1945 and ending in November 1971, when only a few months of life remained and the retired president's days had become so constricted that he ran out of things to write about. The Truman diary is frank, rambunctious, full of life, but no less full of a sense of duty at least equal to that of HST's nineteenth-century predecessors.