The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank (1947)
“A thirteen-year-old girl hiding from the Nazis wrote the most read diary in human history — and never knew it.”
Short Summary
Between June 1942 and August 1944, Anne Frank — a Jewish teenager in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam — kept a diary while hiding with her family and four others in a concealed apartment above her father's office building, which she called the Secret Annex. She wrote with wit, fury, heartbreak, and a literary self-awareness astonishing for her age. On August 4, 1944, the Nazis raided the Annex. Anne was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus in February or March 1945, three months before the war ended. She was fifteen. Her father Otto, the only Annex survivor, published her diary in 1947.
Detailed Summary
On her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, Anne Frank receives a red-and-white checkered diary she has chosen herself. She begins writing immediately, addressing her entries to an imaginary friend named Kitty — a literary device that transforms private record-keeping into something closer to an epis...