The young naturalist W.
This Penguin Classics edition includes '
The Last Diary', which covers the period between submission of the manuscript and Barbellion's actual death in 1919..
Barbellion selected and edited this manuscript himself in 1917, adding a fictional editor's note announcing his own demise.
His prose is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death.
It begins as an ambitious teenager's notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of twenty-six, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease.
Barbellion described this remarkably candid record of living with multiple sclerosis as 'a study in the nude'.
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The young naturalist W
