Yield: The Journal of an Artist

by Anne Truitt

Alexandra Truitt (Preface) and Rachel Kushner (Foreword)

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Book cover for Yield

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This posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in Anne Truitt's remarkable series of journals

“Impressive . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence.”—Publishers Weekly


In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to “let the artist speak.” These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.

In Yield, Truitt’s unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.
  • ISBN10 0300260407
  • ISBN13 9780300260403
  • Publish Date 23 August 2022
  • Publish Status Forthcoming
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Yale University Press