I recently read Mark Twain's Extracts from Diaries of Adam and Eve, and it is a delightful and fun short read. I got nudged to the book from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Wave in the mind" - her book about herself, reading and writing. There is a foreword of sorts to these diaries and so glad that I found them online and read them through. Available here: Eve's Diary, extracts from Adam's Diary
There are many tangents one can launch (for example, Eve considering herself an experiment), but something I remember it by, is the closing note, Adam at Eve's grave:
"ADAM: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden."
And then here's something that summarises the vein in which these diaries are written, how the author regards Adam and Eve, here's an extract from Adam's diary:
Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.
Both Adam and Eve change and grow in their diaries, and over time, their regard for each other grows as well culminating in that final quote by Adam on Eve and Eden.
Reading this and thinking, that Adam and Eve, are quite singular characters with no precedents, no one to learn from but each other. They provide such a large imaginary ground to artists.
That led me to think about where all I have read them referred to in books or poems. So here is opening a list of where I have come across them (this list is quite short at the moment :), will add to this as I come across/ remember more.