Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

“A deeply felt reappraisal
of the work and its global impact.... [Prose] makes a persuasive argument for
Anne Frank’s literary genius.” —New York
Times Book Review

In June, 1942, Anne Frank
received a diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her
family went into hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. For two years,
she described life in hiding in vivid, unforgettable detail and grappled with
the unfolding events of World War II. Before the attic was raided in August,
1944, Anne Frank furiously revised and edited her work, crafting a piece of
literature that she hoped would be read by the public after the war. And read
it has been.


In Anne Frank, bestselling
author Francine Prose deftly parses the artistry, ambition, and enduring
influence of Anne Frank’s beloved classic, The
Diary of a Young Girl. She investigates the diary’s unique afterlife: the
obstacles and criticism Otto Frank faced in publishing his daughter’s words;
the controversy surrounding the diary’s Broadway and film adaptations, and the
social mores of the 1950s that reduced it to a tale of adolescent angst and
love; the conspiracy theories that have cried fraud, and the scientific
analysis that proved them wrong. Finally, having assigned the book to her own students,
Prose considers the rewards and challenges of teaching one of the world’s most
read, and banned, books. How has the life and death of one girl become
emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to
inspire?


Approved by both the Anne Frank
House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the
Frank family, Anne Frank unravels the fascinating story
of a memoir that has become one of the most compelling, intimate, and important
documents of modern history.