Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white-checked diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history. But Anne Frank's diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of art as it is a historical record. Through close reading, she marvels at the teenage Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice, at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into characters.

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.