HENRY GREEN’s first novel, Blindness, was published in 1926, when the young author was twenty-one years old. Unlike Green’s later novels, which tend to eschew formal chapters and artificial divisions, it is split into three parts, the first of which is the diary of the protagonist, schoolboy John Haye. Most critics have read the diary section as establishing the artistic inclinations of the ‘budding’ author, and thus making Green’s novel a Künstlerroman. Yet critics have not examined the composition of this diary section and its relationship to Green’s own life, perhaps because the starting critical assumption regarding Green’s fiction is that it is detached and uninterested in social reality. Yet in his memoir Pack my bag (1940), Green writes, ‘I had begun to keep a diary part of which has survived …  To speak of ‘part’ of a diary as having ‘survived’ when there is no physical copy of the diary extant suggests that the diary has survived in a different form, and this article argues that Green’s diary ‘survived’ by being transcribed in Blindness, which Green started while at Eton and finished in his first year at Oxford. What is curious about the diary in Blindness is how accurately such banal details like the weather and public events correspond to reality, which makes it clear that Green was using a template, such as his own diary, when composing Blindness. In other words, by looking at the diary in Blindness closely and comparing it to published reports in The Times and Eton College Chronicle, one can parse out what was invented and what Green fictionalized, giving us a closer insight into the working of the young novelist, what of the world around him was suitable for fiction, and what needed to be fictionalized. The topic also addresses whether the diary section of Blindness can be considered a historical document for the Eton Arts Society, as early reviewers suggested.