On May 14, 1955, François Mauriac, Nobel-prize winning French novelist and biographer of General Charles de Gaulle, encouraged Wiesel to speak for the survivors of the Holocaust. Mauriac advised Wiesel on the publication of Night, a humanistic documentary which the author and his publisher pared down from a more than 800-page Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) to a manuscript one-eighth of the original, a spare, intense first-person account of his incarceration by the Nazi SS. The book was translated from Yiddish into French, retitled La Nuit, and dedicated to his parents and his little sister.
The most personal branch of literature, autobiography consists of diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs. As narratives, autobiographies introduce the reader to intimate thoughts and responses of a single point of view at a precise moment in time. In some instances, the eyewitness' account of notable incidents outweighs the lack of artistry, as is the case with the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a faithful, if hackneyed account of daily happenings during three significant events in English history — the return of the English monarchy in 1660, the Great Fire, and the Great Plague. In the modern era, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl offers the mature observations of a young Jewish girl in an upstairs annex, hidden from the Nazis who overran Holland during World War II. A similar account comes from Zlata Filipovich, who published an account of the Bosnian civil war in Zlata's Diary.
