Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife [Hardcover]

Francine Prose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 2009

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 from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. For two years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling, intimate, and important documents of modern history - grappling with the unfolding events of World War II, until the hidden attic was raided in August, 1944. But the diary of Anne Frank, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of art as an historical record. Through close reading, she marvels at the teenaged Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice, at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into characters. And Prose addresses what few of the diary's millions of readers may know: this book is a deliberate work of art. During her last months in hiding, 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. Read it has been. Few books have been as influential for so long, and Prose thoroughly 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 1950's social mores that reduced it to a tale of adolescent angst and love; the claims of conspiracy theorists who 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In considering the iconic diary of Anne Frank, prolific novelist and critic Prose (Reading Like a Writer), praises the young writer's fresh narrative voice, characterizations, sense of pacing and ear for dialogue. Prose calls her a literary genius whose diary was a consciously crafted work of literature rather than the spontaneous outpourings of a teenager, and offers evidence that Frank scrupulously revised her work shortly before her arrest and intended to publish it after the war. Fans of literary gossip will savor how writer Meyer Levin, a close friend of Anne's father, Otto Frank, famously gave the Diary a front-page rave in the New York Times and later sued Otto when his script for a play based on it was rejected. Some may conclude that Prose contributes to a queasy-making idolization and commodification of Anne Frank, and that she lets Otto Frank off the hook too easily for minimizing the Jewish essence of the Holocaust, yet the author lucidly collates material from a wide range of sources, and her work would be valuable as a teaching guide for middle school, high school and college students. (Oct.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

At first, critics doubted that anything fresh could be added to this subject, but they soon agreed that Prose sheds new light on Anne Frank in her provocative and penetrating study. She makes a compelling case for Frank's literary brilliance, and though she considers the diary a "masterpiece," she candidly assesses its limitations. Prose also remains impressively impartial when sizing up the colorful figures who had a stake in Anne Frank's diary after her death. Though the New York Times Book Review felt the narrative reads like a study guide at times, others praised Prose's "dogged and impassioned scholarship" (New York Times). Written with great sympathy and sensitivity, Prose challenges readers to rethink the story they thought they knew and its impact across the globe.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1ST edition (September 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006143079X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061430794
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #547,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( F ) > Frank, Anne

More About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen books of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Francine Prose lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It has the shape of drama and literature.", September 29, 2009

By 

E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (Hardcover)

Francine Prose, in "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife," takes a comprehensive look at an individual who, more than six decades after her death, remains an iconic figure all over the world. Prose considers "The Diary of Anne Frank" to be "the greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl." After rereading the diary as an adult, she concludes that it is not merely "the innocent and spontaneous outpourings of a teenager," but rather "a consciously crafted work of literature," one that Anne revised thoroughly, hoping to reach a wide audience someday. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, Anne developed from a girl into a mature adolescent whose keen self-awareness, understanding of human nature, and moral vision were remarkable in one so young. The author pays homage to Anne's technique, characterization, detailed descriptive writing, and skillful use of dialogue, all of which contribute to the diary's widespread appeal.

Anne Frank is divided into four sections: The Life, The Book, The Afterlife, and Anne Frank in the Schools. Prose recounts the events leading up to the Franks' decision to go into hiding. Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two children, as well as four other people, stayed in the annex for two years and one month. They were helped immeasurably by a compassionate Dutch woman named Miep Gies, who did what she could to make the residents as comfortable as possible. Ultimately, however, someone betrayed them and they all perished, with the exception of Otto Frank. In part two, Prose recounts the genesis of the diary and provides details about Anne's revisions, Otto Frank's edits, the controversies that the diary generated, and its reception by the publishing industry. Later, Prose goes on to describe the adaptations of the diary for the stage and screen, the Anne Frank Museum and Foundation in Amsterdam, and the teaching of "The Diary of Anne Frank" in the classroom.

Anne has become an integral part of the fabric of our lives, and Prose makes a convincing case that the diary is more than just a series of banal reflections jotted down by a precocious youngster. Unfortunately, instead of developing this theme more fully, Prose allows herself to get sidetracked. She dwells too much on peripheral matters, and even devotes a few pages to the Holocaust deniers who claim that Anne's diary is a fake. The final chapter on how the diary can be taught in the classroom will, unsurprisingly, be of more interest to educators than to the average reader. Francine Prose is to be admired for sharing her well-researched conclusions with us, but her book would have been more cohesive and readable had she not strayed so far afield from her main thesis.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prose Makes A Compelling Case, October 5, 2009

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (Hardcover)

When originally released in the United States, Anne Frank's THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL met with unmitigated enthusiasm, inspiring everyone who read it with its call to understanding and forgiveness. In a new era, civilized people tolerate the intolerable and allow the same book to be labeled false and pornographic by a vocal few. Yet still the book inspires, speaking a universal language with a wisdom that exceeds the years of its writer, teenaged journalist Anne Frank.

This is a book about the book --- a highly favorable critique of its remarkable content and style, and the story of how it came to be. Anne, as it is famously known, was the child of a prominent Dutch Jew, Otto Frank, who converted the attic of his small factory into a cramped hiding place for his family when the deportation of Jews began to take place during the Nazi regime. For two years, the small group woke up, interacted during the night, slept during the day, and successfully kept themselves from discovery with the help of Otto's trusted factory staff, who brought in supplies and maintained total secrecy. At some point, however, their ruse was discovered and the Nazis finally ripped the Frank family apart.

For the average teenage girl the confining conditions would have been intolerable, and had Anne not been a most unusual teenager, it easily could have been hell. But Anne's rare talent for writing helped her focus most of her time on composing the story of the everyday events she observed in the attic, along with her musings about love and war. She understood that her suffering was inconsequential compared to what was happening to her fellow Jew and Dutch friends outside, and at times she would even optimistically reflect on nature and life and celebrated small moments of beauty in the pages of her book.

Award-winning fiction author Francine Prose makes the compelling case that Anne Frank was no ordinary teen and no ordinary diarist. A writer from early childhood, Anne, who was fierce in protecting the privacy of her document, continually revised her "diary" much like an adult author would as she intended it for publication after the war. And although the diary would eventually reach its way to readers around the world, it was a posthumous publication for Anne. Believing her parents to be dead (in reality, her father was able to survive the camps) and watching her older sister die pitifully in the camp "infirmary," Anne passed away a few scant weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen from a combination of typhus, starvation and a broken heart.

Eventually, her father found her diary when he returned to the attic after the war and saw it for the gem that it was. Along with the little book, there were many pages of revisions and additions, so he devoted himself to editing it into a cohesive whole. Transformed into the book we now know so well, the cover was adorned with a picture of Anne's smiling face, an image that has become an international icon of hope. Prose gives us the back story of the long process of bringing the diary to publication, to the stage and screen, and the serious, often litigious squabbles for the book's rights. Despite the arduous task in bringing the work to the masses, it was all worth the trouble as it became a beacon for tolerance upon publication.

But tragically, like all beautiful things, it was eventually tainted. The book was marked for destruction by Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers; if Anne's story is true, then their twisted beliefs would be impossible to defend. Otto Frank, inspired by his young daughter's spirit, seemed to feel that he needed to uphold her truth by forgiving those who wanted to wrest the story from him, those who claimed he had written the book himself for profit, those who declared that the book was a cesspool of Semitic sex and pedophilic fantasies, and those who wanted the world to believe that Anne never lived and never died. Frank remained curiously passive toward the hate-mongering critics, yet obsessively devoted to the cause of spreading Anne's story, keeping it alive for all times.

Reading this book brings back memories of one's first reading of THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, a literate paean to the idealism of youth amidst the terror and bleak reality of war and hate. It will undoubtedly prompt us to re-read young Anne's diary as a multi-layered work --- not just the chronicle of long-ago events told by a bright youngster, but as a brilliant work of art given to the world by a rare, lost genius.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As Literature, as Drama, as Film, as Life, October 9, 2009

By 

James Hiller (Beaverton, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (Hardcover)

Millions have read it. It's been a successful play, an Academy award winning film, and the basis of studies, documentaries, and features of great museums. Taught in schoolrooms across the country and around the world, the Diary of a Young Girl is not only a great account of people living in hiding for two years, but held up as a beacon of hope, a voice for the downtrodden, a source of courage from people no less than Nelson Mandela. Still, one wonders how many people take this book as great literature? Francine Prose does, and she goes great lengths in dissecting, and ultimately, affirming Anne Frank in her marvelous study, "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife."

The aptly named Ms. Prose fell in love with Anne's book as a young girl, and now, as an adult, takes time to contemplate the deeper significance of the diary, addressing Anne as a writer (and not just a silly teenage girl), the themes she built into the writing and rewriting of her diary, and the following media that truly shaped how many of us approach Anne's diary, often in mistaken ways.

At the start of her study, Prose begins by providing an accurate and quick summary of Anne's life, and the context in which she began her diary, and the development of the book itself. One of the marvelous threads in this discussion is her revelation (although, for me, it shouldn't have been even though it was!) that Anne's diary wasn't written in a single draft, but went through extensive revisions by Anne as she developed her writer's voice, a recognition of a possible audience, and the desire for her diary to be consistant, tell a story, tell a cohesive story. Prose's assertion of Anne's development of her writer's craft has been missing from any discussion of the diary in schoolrooms, and it refreshens and deepens our appreciation of this budding and silenced author.

Prose's chapters on the play and the film are complete and somewhat harsh; from Prose's opinion, deservedly so. She is no fan of either, mostly based on the portrayals of Anne in the films as a giddy, young girl without a brain (Prose's most painful moment from the film? The first scene with Anne where we see her removing her underwear. Oy!). It disservices the image Prose works to create in the previous chapters of a proactive Anne; after watching the film, it is nearly impossible to connect the deep work of this author with this Anne on the screen.

In fact, it goes into a deeper thought of what we need of our heroes. Anne has passed from writer and Holocaust victim to symbol of hope, optimism, courage, and inner strength. In doing so, we need to transform Anne from human to almost mythical, yet, we do not maintain in our society many images of strong women, much less strong girls (and those that are are labeled quickly with an unflattering label that shant appear in this review). Is Anne's rise as a giddy young girl a result of our inability to see young girls as anything else? What if there was a play, or a film, with Anne, closer as to what she really was? Maybe it is Anne Frank Remembered?

At any rate, Prose's book is a great read for those Anne Frank devotees wanting more about this miraculous girl ... no, this miraculous author, who continues to impress, amaze, and inspire us, with her words, her writing, and her two years spent in hiding just to survive.