Florence Wolfson Howitt (1915-2012)

Florence Wolfson Howitt has died at the age of ninety-six. From the New York Times obituary:

Florence Wolfson, the daughter of well-to-do parents living in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was 14 when she was given a little red diary with gold-edged pages. For the next five years, without skipping a day, she wrote four-line entries that evoked her passions.

“Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,” she wrote on June 28, 1932. “I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.”

The diary, found years later in a dumpster, became the stuff of a Times article and a book, Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary, which I wrote about in this post.

[What the diarist wrote: “Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven & music & Huysmans — I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.” The Times obituary reproduces the edited text of The Red Leather Diary.]