How Anne Frank Became a Writer: Revelations from the “Tales and Events” Notebook

Abstract

When he returned to Amsterdam in spring 1945, Otto Frank discovered that not one but two versions of his daughter's diary had survived the Holocaust: the three notebooks of so‐called version A and the revision of that diary on loose sheets of paper, called version B. Other texts also survived, including a notebook Anne titled “Tales and Events from the Secret Annex,” where she collected more than three dozen short pieces of prose. Best known for its “tales,” the book is, in fact, mostly nonfiction, including numerous sketches of annex life. More self‐contained and literary than her diary entries, they show Anne experimenting as a writer. They also show her writing vigorously in the summer of 1943, a period unrepresented in version A since none of that year's diary notebooks survived. Yet, as Anne later wrote, it was “the second half of 1943” when her life changed: when she began “to think, to write.” My goal here is to better fit the “Tales” notebook into the story of Anne's life and work, a project made easier by the recent publication of Anne Frank: The Collected Works, which includes, for the first time in English, all of the author's writing, in one volume, in separate, continuous texts. To read those texts in the order in which she wrote them is to see Anne Frank not just growing as a writer but becoming a writer. The results are of interest not only to scholars of Anne's life and work but to teachers of young readers and writers, for whom Anne Frank has long been a model, if an imperfectly understood one.