McClay's Diary is one of the most enlightening windows on the first Congress and an uncommonly unflattering look at the first VP, John Adams ("Bonnie Johnie"). The Diary was published by McClay's family decades after his death and apparently several pages were ripped out and are completely gone. The Diary has come out in at least three editions (one a recent paperback), and the Library of Congress has either the original or a microfilm of the original, and those pages are really missing. The odd thing is that the missing pages occur just when it appears he is about to describe some encounter with George Washington ... whom he apparently was not impressed with.
Thanks, I'd never heard of him and still don't know that much about him.
I found that it often helped when researching the first congress to browse his Journal for whatever I was interested in to give me the date the matter was considered and often who spoke on it.
Eventually I was reading the Journal for it's own sake and just had to share on Free Republic some of those wonderful quotes I kept running across .
I'll look out for that paperback edition. I'd like to have his journal on hard copy.