Ruth Franklin Examines Anne Frank's Legacy in Experimental Biography

By
Cristóbal Riego
January 29, 2025

Adjunct Associate Professor of Writing Ruth Franklin's latest book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, investigates both the historical reality and cultural impact of Anne Frank's diary. The book, which releases on January 27 through Yale University Press, seeks to reclaim Anne the person from Anne the symbol by examining her development as a writer and the subsequent transformation of her work into a global phenomenon.

Drawing on extensive research, Franklin chronicles Anne's deliberate revision of her private journals into a more polished memoir-in-letters, a process that began after she learned of plans to collect wartime documentation. The book also explores what Franklin terms the "afterlife" of the diary, including Otto Frank's role in its publication following his return from Auschwitz.

In The Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon notes that Franklin "explores the idea that the posthumous fame attached to Anne Frank has all but eclipsed the fact of her reality." The book examines how Anne's story has been adapted and often reinterpreted over the decades, from stage and screen adaptations to her emergence as what Publishers Weekly calls "a figurehead against prejudice in the broadest sense."

Franklin's study arrives amid renewed debates about antisemitism and Jewish identity. Writing for the Jewish Book Council, Maksim Goldenshteyn observes that "readers may find themselves wincing more than once at the ways Anne's story has been used and misused," but praises Franklin's ability to reclaim "Anne the person from Anne the symbol by recognizing her intentions as an artist."

Franklin's previous biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a "best book of 2016" by The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. Her criticism and essays have appeared in publications including The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.