CANR
WORK TITLE: The Many Lives of Anne Frank
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ruthfranklin.net/
CITY: Brooklyn
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LAST VOLUME: CA 403
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Children: three.
EDUCATION:Columbia University; Harvard, M.A. (Comparative Literature).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer; book critic, former senior editor, New Republic.
AWARDS:Guggenheim Fellowship in biography; Cullman Fellowship, New York Public Library; Leon Levy Fellowship in biography; Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism; National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and Salmagundi.
SIDELIGHTS
Ruth Franklin, a former senior editor at the New Republic, has written book reviews and criticism for many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. She has received numerous awards, including the Roger Shattuck Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, and the Cullman Foundation. Her books include a work on Holocaust literature and a biography of American writer Shirley Jackson.
“Every canonical work of Holocaust literature involves some graying of the line between fiction and reality,” writes Franklin in her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Intent on illuminating the thinking behind categorizing Holocaust literature as either autobiographical fiction or as memoir, the author examines works by Auschwitz survivors such as Imre Kertész, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowoski, as well as works by “those who came after” and lacked personal experience of the death camps. Among authors in this category are Thomas Keneally, whose 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark became the basis for the film Schindler’s List; Bernhard Schlink, German author of the 1996 novel The Reader; and W.G. Sebald, whose books blend real characters and events with fictional ones. Franklin also devotes a chapter to writers with a much more distant relationship to the Holocaust, among them novelists Melvin Jules Bukiet and Thane Rosenbaum.
The author challenges Wiesel’s argument that fictional treatments of the Holocaust are an insult to its victims, and that the only appropriate way to address the subject is through witnesses’ testimonials and documentary materials. “If fiction could ever be a complete invention, then it wouldn’t be able to teach us what we know, or think we know about life,” writes Franklin. “The historian’s anvil and the novelist’s crucible perform different functions, but they are made out of the same material.” According to Literary Review contributor Anne Baney, the author “expertly examines the complexity of witnessing and in turn raises far more universal questions about why we create and consume art, how authority is gained within literature, and why, despite Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that ‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ it is also essential.”
The author concludes the book with a chapter on third-generation Holocaust writers, such as novelists Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, and Michael Chabon, whose more aesthetic approach to the subject suggests a unifying perspective on the Holocaust but has also been seen as controversial. Commentary contributor Sam Munson objected to Franklin’s acceptance of this “problematic interpretation,” describing it as a “concession to sentimental universalism” when the Holocaust should be seen as a singularly Jewish event. Baney, however, praised the author’s concluding point, stating in the Literary Review: “Franklin implores her readers that Holocaust writings must teach us something more universal, something for the future, ‘for a novel about Auschwitz can never only be a novel about Auschwitz: it is a novel also about Armenia, about Siberia, about Cambodia, about Sarajevo, about Darfur.’ Likewise, a book about lies and truth in Holocaust fiction is not merely about the Holocaust, but about why we study history, why we read, and why we tell stories.”
Franklin’s second book is the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Jackson also wrote numerous short stories, the best known of which is “The Lottery,” first published in the New Yorker in 1948. Much of Jackson’s work explores the darkness and horror beneath the surface of ordinary life, and the writer’s personal life sometimes paralleled the trapped, stifled existence of her characters. Born into a wealthy family in 1916 and educated at Syracuse University, Jackson was socially awkward. Her marriage to literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who became a professor at Bennington College, was not a happy one; he belittled his wife, refused to help with housework or child care for the couple’s four young children, and engaged in numerous affairs. Jackson remained at home, where she wrote prolifically. She suffered from bouts of psychosomatic ailments, including periods of agoraphobia that kept her virtually housebound. She died in 1965 of heart failure at age forty-eight.
Calling the biography “sympathetic and masterful,” Elaine Showalter observed in the Washington Post that Franklin’s book “uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’” Jackson wrote lighter domestic pieces for magazines in addition to her more gothic works, and as Franklin points out, these seemingly opposite types of literature are actually “profoundly interconnected.” The humorous pieces express the frustrations of the conformist 1950s, when women were expected to find fulfilment in domestic life, while the darker works offer glimpses of women reclaiming female power through mystic channels.
Franklin writes that Jackson rebelled against her overbearing mother by refusing to conform to stereotypical images of female beauty or fashion. She acted the part of a supportive faculty wife in the tiny town of Bennington, Vermont, but secretly seethed with anger toward her abusive husband and dreamed of divorce. She also hated the casual racism and anti-Semitism that surrounded her in Bennington. As her marriage grew increasingly dysfunctional, Jackson coped by abusing alcohol and prescription drugs, smoking, and becoming morbidly obese. Yet even when she was so ill that she could not leave her room, Jackson continued to write, channeling her frustration and rage into her fiction.
Drawing on Jackson’s published work as well as the writer’s journals and diaries, which include snippets from violent nightmares and escape fantasies, Franklin reveals Jackson’s private struggles as well as her literary genius. “I absolutely relate to her struggles to reconcile her role as a mother with her professional life,” the author explained to Signature contributor Kelsey Osgood. “A major part of what draws me to Jackson is the way she negotiates that tension in her work—sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so.” Observing that the art of literary biography demands special skill in judging the connections between the subject’s life and body of work, American Scholar contributor Susan Cheever observed that Franklin “fearlessly wades right into this deep water” in a book that ultimately “honors and understands the writing of one of the twentieth century’s great American storytellers.” Charles McGrath, reviewing Shirley Jackson in the New York Times, commented that Franklin “makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist—not a major one, perhaps, but one worthy of renewed attention.”
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Franklin’s biography of Shirley Jackson in 2016 played a major role in the Jackson revival. In her next book, Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s: The Road Through the Wall; Hangsaman; The Bird’s Nest; The Sundial, she edited a collection of the first four of Jackson’s chilling and hypnotic novels over ten years that established her as the twentieth-century heir to gothic novelists like Poe and Hawthorne. These novels were made newly accessible to the next generation of readers. The Road Through the Wall (1948) is a blistering critique of the small mindedness of suburbanites in a California town; Hangsaman (1951) follows the slow unraveling of the mind of a lonely college student; The Bird’s Nest (1954) is about a secretary who suffers from multiple personalities; and The Sundial (1958) follows a wealthy family preparing for an apocalypse.
In an interview with the Library of America, Franklin acknowledged that with satire, horror, the supernatural, and psychological thrillers, Jackson’s work cannot be categorized by genre, saying: “One of the most striking features of Jackson’s work is that she never did the same thing twice. Each of her novels has its own distinct form and focus…. I think today’s readers are much more open to the idea that writers can publish works across many genres—and that the boundaries between genre fiction and so-called literary fiction can be quite porous.” These selections reveal Jackson’s “vibrant, eloquent prose; incisive characterizations; intimate understanding of fear; and unerring awareness of everyday evil,” noted a Publishers Weekly critic.
Franklin next wrote the biography, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, part of the Jewish Lives series. Based on research but taking an experimental approach, Franklin chronicles and interprets the transformation of the famous diarist during her two years in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, and the influence she had on the rest of the world. The first part of the book depicts Anne in hiding, while the rest of the book explores how her father Otto Frank’s decision to publish the diary led to revelations about the Holocaust and influenced such freedom fighters as South Africa’s anti-apartheid activists. “Franklin’s probing examination of the eventful afterlife of Frank’s diary testifies to how the lessons of the Holocaust continue to be litigated,” declared a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. In Spectator, a writer said: “Franklin writes with enormous intelligence about the many ‘cultural products’ that have grown from Anne’s legacy, and, just as importantly, she gives us a human, sympathetic and honest picture of the girl herself.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Franklin, Ruth, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2011.
PERIODICALS
American Scholar, autumn, 2016, Susan Cheever, “Darkness Illuminated: A Horror Writer Whose Real Demons Were off the Page,” p. 115.
Atlantic, October, 2016, Heather Havrilesky, “The Possessed; Shirley Jackson’s Vision of Haunted Womanhood,” p. 46.
Booklist, June 1, 2016, Donna Seaman, review of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, p. 36.
Bookwatch, November, 2016, review of Shirley Jackson.
Choice, August, 2011, J. Fischel, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 2303.
Commentary, February, 2011, Sam Munson, “Graying the Line,” p. 67.
Economist, September 24, 2016, “Ghost Stories: Shirley Jackson,” p. 80.
Internet Bookwatch, November, 2016, review of Shirley Jackson.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2016, review of Shirley Jackson.
Library Journal, October 1, 2010, Judy Brink-Drescher, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 76; August 1, 2016, Patrick A. Smith, review of Shirley Jackson, p. 93.
Literary Review, fall, 2010, Anne Baney, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 154.
New Statesman (London, England), February 28, 2011, David Herman, “I Remember Auschwitz,” p. 51.
New York Times, September 30, 2016, Charles McGrath, “The Case for Shirley Jackson.”
Publishers Weekly, May 23, 2016, review of Shirley Jackson, p. 59; August 17, 2020, review of Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, p. 58; November 25, 2024, review of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, p. 45.
Shofar, fall, 2012, Myrna Goldenberg, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 153; fall, 2015, Paul Reitter, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 147.
Skeptical Inquirer, January-February, 2012, review of A Thousand Darknesses, p. 60.
Spectator (London, England), February 12, 2011, Jonathan Mirsky, “Can It Be Described?,” p. 36; December 3, 2016, Julie Myerson, “High Priestess of Horror,” p. 36; March 29, 2025, review of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, p. 32.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), September 23, 2016, Lauren LeBlanc, review of Shirley Jackson.
Washington Post, September 16, 2016, Elaine Showalter, review of Shirley Jackson.
ONLINE
Deborah Kalb Books, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (April 4, 2013), Deborah Kalb, “Q&A with Ruth Franklin.”
Ruth Franklin Home Page, http://www.ruthfranklin.net (February 12, 2017).
Signature, http:// www.signature-reads.com/ (January 17, 2014), Kelsey Osgood, “Ruth Franklin on the Enduring Appeal of Shirley Jackson’s Life and Work.”
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about 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, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is 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. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her most recent book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “an essential look at the diarist’s legacy.” Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about 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, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is 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. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
She was asked by the New York Institute of Humanities about how she conducts research and how long it took to write the Jackson biography: “I spent about six years on [the book]. A lot of it was spent doing archival research. Jackson’s archives are in the Library of Congress, about 50 boxes full of papers. And then her husband, Stanley Hyman, has his own archives at the Library of Congress, so that’s another 50 boxes or so. Along the way I was able to uncover more correspondence in people’s private collections. So it was mostly that and also a lot of interviewing. I travelled around, to California where two of Jackson’s children live, and to Vermont, where her other two children live, and to various other places. I interviewed students who studied with Stanley Hyman, and neighbors who had lived near Jackson and Hyman.”
Franklin attended Columbia as an undergraduate, and holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her most recent book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “an essential look at the diarist’s legacy.” Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about 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, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is 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. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
She was asked by the New York Institute of Humanities about how she conducts research and how long it took to write the Jackson biography: “I spent about six years on [the book]. A lot of it was spent doing archival research. Jackson’s archives are in the Library of Congress, about 50 boxes full of papers. And then her husband, Stanley Hyman, has his own archives at the Library of Congress, so that’s another 50 boxes or so. Along the way I was able to uncover more correspondence in people’s private collections. So it was mostly that and also a lot of interviewing. I travelled around, to California where two of Jackson’s children live, and to Vermont, where her other two children live, and to various other places. I interviewed students who studied with Stanley Hyman, and neighbors who had lived near Jackson and Hyman.”
Franklin attended Columbia as an undergraduate, and holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Interviews October 30, 2020
Ruth Franklin on the novels of Shirley Jackson: “She never did the same thing twice”
Just out from Library of America, Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s collects the four books that launched the inimitable, all-too-brief career of the author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. The Road Through the Wall (1948), Hangsaman (1951), The Bird’s Nest (1954), and The Sundial (1958) are hypnotic, superbly controlled works of psychological unease that are no less disturbing for eschewing the supernatural elements of Jackson’s better-known later work.
Shirley Jackson:
Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s
Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s follows by exactly ten years Library of America’s first Shirley Jackson collection, Novels & Stories, which helped consolidate a major reevaluation of Jackson’s literary reputation and firmly established her as the twentieth-century heir to Poe, Hawthorne, and the Henry James of “The Turn of the Screw.”
The new book’s editor is Ruth Franklin, who played a major role in the Jackson revival herself with her 2016 biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. A critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and other publications, Franklin is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011).
Shirley Jackson in 1951, the year Hangsaman was published. (AP Photo)
Library of America: Ten years after your influential New Republic essay and the first Library of America Jackson volume, the Shirley Jackson revival has become a full-blown renaissance that spills over into pop culture. While acknowledging the importance of your essay (and subsequent biography), what has changed in the culture so that Jackson is now widely considered a mainstream literary figure?
Ruth Franklin: The first Library of America volume was essential in bringing a wide range of Jackson’s work to the attention of those who might have previously only known a few of her stories or novels—including me! Now the four novels published in the second volume have been made newly accessible to the next generation of readers. While critics of Jackson’s era sometimes were frustrated by her refusal to be easily categorized by genre, I think today’s readers are much more open to the idea that writers can publish works across many genres—and that the boundaries between genre fiction and so-called literary fiction can be quite porous. (I have some further ideas about this that I expanded upon in my earlier blog post.)
LOA: At least a few readers coming to this collection will only be familiar with the later Jackson of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. What will they find in the new Library of America collection that might surprise them?
Franklin: One of the most striking features of Jackson’s work is that she never did the same thing twice. Each of her novels has its own distinct form and focus. The Road Through the Wall is an acidly satiric depiction of life in an upscale California suburb not unlike the one where Jackson grew up. Hangsaman is a coming-of-age novel, albeit an extremely unconventional one. The Bird’s Nest is based on a psychiatrist’s case study of a woman with multiple personality disorder, although Jackson takes that research into a surprising direction. And The Sundial, in which a wealthy family preps for an apocalypse that may or may not be about to occur, almost shades into science fiction. I’ll venture there’s something in each of these novels to surprise the reader who knows only the Jackson of psychological horror and suspense.
First edition hardcovers of the four novels collected in LOA’s new Shirley Jackson volume.
LOA: In lieu of haunted houses, etc., Jackson’s first two novels, The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman, unfold in more quotidian real-world settings, a San Francisco suburb and a liberal arts college. How does Jackson still manage to create an atmosphere of pervasive unease against these ostensibly more familiar backdrops?
Franklin: The idea that horror can take place anywhere, even in the coziest, most familiar setting, is one of Jackson’s trademarks. Just think of “The Lottery,” in which a barbaric ritual plays out in a perfectly ordinary, nondescript American village. In those two early novels, everything starts out looking normal, but we get clues pretty quickly that while the setting is conventional, the people are not. It takes just a snippy comment from a nosy neighbor or a girl in the dorms to tip the landscape of the novel into something more unstable. Of course, even in Hill House and We Have Always Been Lived in the Castle, which use the uncanny in a more obvious way, there’s always a certain ambiguity about what exactly is going on. Critics are still unresolved on the question of whether Jackson intended the ghosts in Hill House to be actually supernatural or the psychological manifestations of Eleanor.
LOA: Your biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is a powerfully argued case for Jackson’s body of work as “the secret history of American women of her era.” We’re wondering if you could talk a little about how Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest, in particular, show Jackson as “a writer about the lives of women” (to borrow a phrase you used in a 2016 interview).
Franklin: Both of those novels focus intensely on a young woman in the throes of a psychological breakdown. In Hangsaman, first-year college student Natalie Waite feels her psyche gradually splitting in two, for no immediately obvious reason. The Bird’s Nest describes a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder, a diagnosis that was gaining in popular attention in the early 1950s, when Jackson wrote the novel.
But both books also speak in a much larger way to a culture in which the pressures women experienced could easily become unbearable. In many ways, women in the 1940s and 1950s (and later) had to wall off aspects of their character in order to survive. They had to behave conventionally at school at the cost of suppressing a wilder self, or to conform (at least superficially) to the social expectation to be a good housewife while harboring professional and creative ambitions. And in each of those books, the female characters are deeply misunderstood by the men who believe they are trying to help them—a situation that mirrors the profound confusion with which male critics greeted the novels in their time.
LOA: Several commentators have suggested that The Sundial is a comedy—if of a rather black, uniquely Jacksonian turn. Leaving aside her memoirs of motherhood, is humor an aspect of Jackson’s work that still goes underappreciated?
Franklin: Perhaps—although those motherhood memoirs have always had a lot of fans! There are definitely some very funny moments in The Sundial, in which some members of a wealthy family become convinced that the apocalypse is nigh and that they have been singled out as worthy of survival. (It is hard to imagine a group of people less suited to carry on the destiny of humanity.)
But there’s humor in just about all of Jackson’s fiction, even in The Haunting of Hill House, in which she breaks the tension of the haunted house by bringing in a hilariously funny character, an absurd medium who believes herself to be an expert in the supernatural but fails to perceive the ghosts that everyone else senses. In a lecture she gave regularly on fiction writing, Jackson called her technique “garlic in fiction”—grabbing the reader’s attention by using provocative little adjectives or images “to accent and emphasize.” Humor is one of the most effective ways in which she did that.
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Baltimore-Born Author Ruth Franklin Examines Anne Frank’s Life and Legacy
January 30, 2025
Haydee M. Rodriguez
Author and literary critic Ruth Franklin
If she were alive today, Anne Frank would be 95 years old. But some would argue that the celebrated Holocaust diarist never really died and has acquired a unique sense of immortality.
Ruth Franklin, an award-winning, Baltimore-born author, editor and literary critic, revisits the life and legacy of the Dutch-Jewish teenager — who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 at the age of 15 — with her new biography, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank” (Yale University Publishing).
A 1991 graduate of the Park School of Baltimore, Franklin, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, recently spoke about the book at Bird in Hand Café & Bookstore, 11 East 33rd Street in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood.
Franklin also spoke at Shabbat services recently as the scholar-in-residence at Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation in Pikesville.
Franklin is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” (Oxford University Press) and “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life” (Liveright).
She is a former editor at The New Republic whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications.
With “The Many Lives of Anne Frank,” Franklin takes a fresh and innovative look at the discussions and debates surrounding the diarist’s life and work, including the controversial adaptations of her journal.
“I just felt that the myths about the diary are so persistent,” Franklin said in a recent phone interview with Jmore. “It’s been public knowledge for more than 30 years that Anne edited and revised her own diary and yet there is still this enduring sense of it of a kind of found object. I feel really strongly that the persistence of seeing it that way doesn’t give her the credit she deserves for taking the rough draft of her diary and making it into this intentional testimonial to the persecution of the Jews in The Netherlands.”
Extensively researched, “The Many Lives” also chronicles Frank’s evolution as a fictional character in American Jewish literature, and the ways in which her story and image have been politically and culturally appropriated and exploited over the years.
“She is interpreted in so many different ways and I started to feel strongly that the more we see her as this generic symbol, the less we understand who she really was,” Franklin said. “So it was important to me to get as close as possible to get back to her identify as a real person and try to see the world through her eyes.”
Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and is the most widely read work of the Holocaust era. (Flickr Commons)
Franklin examines the youngster’s transformation from hidden child and Holocaust victim to international icon whose diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and is the most widely read work of the Holocaust.
Franklin’s biography is divided into two sections, the first examining Frank’s childhood in the German city of Frankfurt from 1929 through 1934 and her life in her adopted hometown of Amsterdam until her death.
The second part covers the decades following her passing and the many versions of Anne Frank that the world has come to know and love.
“The second part of the book … is a cultural history of the idea of Anne as it has developed since 1947, when the ‘Diary’ first appeared in Dutch,” Franklin writes in the introduction.
Novelist and essayist Dara Horn, author of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award-winning “People Love Dead Jews,” called “The Many Lives” a “tour de force [that] sets the standard for anyone thinking about Anne Frank for years to come.”
In a column for the media source Literary Hub, Franklin wrote that she hopes her book will inspire more scholars, authors and readers to investigate Anne Frank’s life and legacy in a comprehensive and objective manner.
“A scholar to whom I reached out for advice when beginning my research pointedly warned me that Anne Frank studies was a ‘crowded field,’ Franklin wrote. “I hope my experience will encourage other writers to be persistent and ‘turn every page,’ as [acclaimed biographer and journalist] Robert Caro famously puts it. Even when the ground has been trampled by many feet, a person with a fresh perspective and a careful eye may yet find something unexpected.”
Franklin told Jmore she hopes her book will help readers view Anne Frank as more than simply an optimistic teenager who naively believed that “most people are good at heart.” She views Frank as a young, astute writer who fully recognized what was happening around her in wartime Amsterdam. As the diarist observed, “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”
For information, visit yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248128/the-many-lives-of-anne-frank/ or ruthfranklin.net/author/bio/.
Haydee M. Rodriguez is a Baltimore-based freelance writer.
The Many Lives of Anne Frank
Ruth Franklin. Yale Univ., $30 (448p) ISBN 978-0-300-24812-8
This trenchant study from literary critic Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses) chronicles the brief life of Anne Frank (1929-1945) and traces the complex ways in which her story continues to reverberate. The biographical first section captures the claustrophobia of Frank's two years in the secret annex of her father's former workplace and provides a wrenching account of the months leading up to her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Franklin then turns her attention to Otto Frank's publication of his daughter's diary in 1947 and how it's been used and misused in the decades since. Some critics accuse the diary's adaptations of downplaying Frank's Judaism, Franklin writes, noting that the popular 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank altered a Frank quote about the persecution of Jewish people to instead emphasize how, in the playwrights' words, "there've always been people that've had to [suffer]." Elsewhere, Franklin discusses how Diary of a Young Girl inspired South African anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s, and how American conservatives have sought to ban the book over passages in which Frank reflects on her sexuality. The biography succeeds in "restoring [Frank] as a human being rather than an icon," and Franklin's probing examination of the eventful afterlife of Frank's diary testifies to how the lessons of the Holocaust continue to be litigated. It adds up to an essential look at the diarist's legacy. Photos. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Many Lives of Anne Frank." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 45, 25 Nov. 2024, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818519100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=901d66cc. Accessed 1 May 2025.
The Many Lives of Anne Frank
by Ruth Franklin
Yale, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 440
Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February 1944. Her last days were spent in the sick barracks caring for her sister Margot, who had a high fever and smiled contentedly, her mind already wandering. Anne, too, had been feverish, but 'friendly and sweet', according to witnesses. Her last recorded words were: 'Margot will sleep well, and when she sleeps I won't need to get up again.'
Ruth Franklin's superb and subtle book pivots around this moment, which is described in a starkly titled central chapter, 'Corpse'. Half her study tells Anne's story up to the tragedy of her death. It traces her parents' backgrounds and characters, her birth in Germany, the family's flight to the Netherlands, their going into hiding, the writing of the diary, the betrayal and arrest, Anne's time in Auschwitz and her final days in Bergen-Belsen.
The second half of the book, which is equally fascinating, examines what happened afterwards, starting with Otto Frank first reading his daughter's papers, the editing process and publication, and then Anne's rapid rise to international prominence as the most famous victim of the Holocaust. Franklin looks at depictions of Anne in plays, films and books and at the use and abuse of her name and story for political purposes. There is now a small industry of Anne Frank scholarship, but a good case could be made for this book being the definitive work on the subject. It is highly recommended.
Otto, one of the heroes of the study, was born in Frankfurt in 1889, less than a month after Hitler. His father owned a bank and the family had a box at the opera and a large house where they entertained in style and held costume balls. Otto learned the cello and travelled to America. In August 1915 he joined the army and served with distinction as an officer. After the war, the family bank foundered, partly because of a patriotic over-investment in war bonds, but even so the Franks were well off. Otto married Edith, also wealthy and from a family that kept kosher. Otto, by contrast, did not have a bar mitzvah and never learned to read or speak Hebrew.
Annelies Marie--her full name--was born on 12 June 1929, three years after her sister. The two girls were very different. Margot was sporty, quiet, obedient and always successful in school. Anne was physically frail, a chatterbox, easily distracted, flirty and creative. Only their early years were spent in Germany. Otto and Edith were wise to the dangers of Nazism and in 1934, soon after Hitler's coming to power, they moved to the Netherlands, where they set up a pleasant but much more modest home.
The family were happy in Amsterdam, but Franklin also chronicles their growing awareness that even there wasn't safe. Desperate attempts were made to secure first an American and then a Cuban set of visas. These, however, were not forthcoming, even for considerable sums. In May 1940 Hitler invaded the Netherlands. At first, little happened, but by 1942 anti-Jewish measures had intensified and by the summer a full programme of deportation to the death camps in theeast began. On 6 July 1942 the Franks--ever prepared--went into hiding as part of a group of eight.
Anne's years in the secret annexe will be familiar to readers from her diary. What is less well known, and excellently described by Franklin, is the way in which the diary came into being. There was, in fact, no single document. Anne was given a notebook with a red-and-white checkered cover on her 13th birthday. Her first entry, penned alongside a photograph she'd pasted in, was made that day:
Gorgeous photograph isn't it!!!!
I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never
been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great
support and comfort to me.
The entry beneath this, again of two sentences, is dated 28 September 1942, more than three months later, and is followed by a list of 'the 7 or 12 beautiful features (not mine mind you!)' starting with '1. Blue eyes, black hair. (No)'. The entry below that jumps back in time, dated 14 June.
So the first notebook is highly erratic. Entries appear on random pages and only ten in total are written between June and September 1942. Some of these, but not all, are in diary format. After September, many of the entries are transcribed letters, a few of them real, others to invented characters such as Loutje, Pien and Pop. The notebook also contains some practice at shorthand, various comments on stuck-in photographs and a neatly written out alphabet.
In all, Anne filled four notebooks during her time in hiding, but one of these has been lost. By 1944 she had become a regular diarist, beginning entries 'Dear Kitty', the salutation to an imaginary friend and confidante that is now known to millions. She chronicled her love affair with Peter van Pels, her rows with her mother, the hardships of existence in the annexe, her hopes for life in the future, her constant fear of being discovered. These notebooks, which run from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944, are collectively known to scholars as Version A.
In the spring of 1944, however, Anne heard a broadcast on Allied radio in which a Dutch minister in exile suggested that after the war there would be a need for a record --in the form of diaries and letters--of the Dutch experience of occupation. Diaries, he said, might be published. This inspired Anne, and as a result she quickly began work on a novel, The Secret Annexe, written on carbon paper and based on the record she had kept in her notebooks. It reads like a diary and is highly autobiographical, but it uses pseudonyms, and the episodes in it are reconstructed from memory and research. It is known as Version B.
On 4 August 1944 the annexe was discovered and the eight occupants arrested. Anne's papers--Version A, Version B and various other bits of fiction and non-fiction--were left behind. Not until Otto returned from Auschwitz on 3 June 1945--the group's sole survivor--did anyone read them.
The second half of Franklin's book tells the story of how those loose, disordered papers were transformed into The Diary of a Young Girl and how the book became a worldwide phenomenon. Otto read Version A and Version B in floods of tears, overcome by his daughter's ambition to be a writer. He consulted experts and publishers and finally created a fusion of the two versions, inventing nothing but brilliantly splicing and cutting. This is known as Version C. It blended the younger, flighty Anne of Version A with the more earnest, authorial girl of Version B. It also removed some of the criticism of Edith and a few of the more explicit sexual passages. Today, readers are most likely to encounter the full, unexpurgated, expanded version of Otto's creation, known as Version D.
At first, there was only modest interest in the book. The British publishers soon withdrew it after poor sales. But in America, where Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to put her name to a preface, it soon became a bestseller. Published on 16 June 1952, the first print run sold out before the end of the day. A second print run of 15,000 copies sold out in a week, and a third, of 25,000, was ordered. Within months, there were plans for a play and Hollywood film.
Franklin examines the conflicts around Anne as her fame grew exponentially. There was a court case over the play, with the writers accused of plagiarism by a rival play-wright, Meyer Levin, who also felt that the Jewishness of Anne had been minimised to ensure success on the stage. Levin claimed that the Anne of the play and the subsequent film had been made 'universal' and therefore inauthentic. There was another trial regarding the diary's authenticity and many rows over portrayals of Anne that appeared in novels. Was she a lesbian? Was she a spokesperson for all the oppressed, or only for a specific Jewish experience?
To date, The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 30 million copies in 70-odd languages. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is always booked to capacity and has nearly 1.3 million visitors a year. The author's photograph is so well known it has been compared with the Mona Lisa. This book does a brilliant job of accounting for that phenomenon. Franklin writes with enormous intelligence about the many 'cultural products' that have grown from Anne's legacy, and, just as importantly, she gives us a human, sympathetic and honest picture of the girl herself. Anne would be 95 now, had she survived the war and lived that long. As it is, thanks to her father and her own genius, she has achieved a kind of immortality.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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"A kind of immortality: Bart van Es on the story of how a young Jewish girl living in constant fear during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands would produce a global bestseller." Spectator, vol. 357, no. 10257, 29 Mar. 2025, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A833301301/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ca2fe796. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Franklin, Ruth THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK Yale Univ. (NonFiction None) $30.00 1, 27 ISBN: 9780300248128
The short life and long legacy of the world's most famous Holocaust victim.
Anne Frank got her first diary as a present for her 13th birthday, just weeks before her family went into hiding in 1942. By the time she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, not yet 16, she had filled multiple notebooks and was revising them for postwar publication before her arrest. Franklin, who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her biographyShirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, in Part 1 follows Anne from childhood in Germany to Holland and Bergen-Belsen. She spotlights Anne's increasing maturity over the course of two years in hiding and takes a close look at her revisions as indications of "the coherent testimonial narrative she now wanted to write." Part 2, described by Franklin as "a cultural history of the idea of Anne as it has developed since 1947," contains some familiar material: her father Otto's recovery and editing of the diary (he removed some of Anne's more acerbic comments and included material she had cut as too personal); its publication and international success; the stage and movie versions criticized today for downplaying Anne's Jewishness to make her an all-purpose icon of human endurance--these topics have been covered widely. More unusual, and quite moving, are the "interludes" testifying to the diary's impact on individual readers across the globe. A final chapter, "Anne in the Political World," is problematic, especially when Franklin tackles with evident discomfort the fierce debates over Israel's treatment of Palestinians and its military response to the 2023 Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians. Speculating on how Anne might have viewed these issues if she had survived doesn't seem particularly relevant to the general thrust of Franklin's thoughtful book, which succeeds best in its aims of "recognizing and respecting Anne's intentions as an author" and "reclaiming her as a human being rather than a symbol."
An intriguing effort that tries to do too much.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Franklin, Ruth: THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5d91f1d1. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s
Edited by Ruth Franklin. Library of America, $40 (850p) ISBN 978-1-59853-670-6
Admirers of Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) will welcome this collection of her first four novels. The Road Through the Wall (1948) satirizes suburban life, slowly revealing the petty jealousies and casual cruelty of the residents of a "nice" neighborhood of a California town. Hangsaman (1951) uses razor-sharp wit to chart the fall of 17-year-old Natalie Waite as she slips into an ever-darkening world of madness. In The Bird's Nest (1954), timid 23-year-old Elizabeth finds her many alternate selves at her psychiatrist's office. The Sundial (1958), a creepy gothic horror tale combined with a black comedy of manners, exposes the deplorable nature of the members of the Halloran family as they wait for the end of the world. These novels are united by the author's vibrant, eloquent prose; incisive characterizations; intimate understanding of fear; and unerring awareness of everyday evil. Jackson's psychological weirdness compels, but in large doses it may leave readers feeling emotionally exhausted. (Oct.)
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"Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 33, 17 Aug. 2020, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635353552/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=030bae09. Accessed 1 May 2025.