The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank · 1947
Anne Frank hid in a secret annex for two years and kept a diary. She was killed at Bergen-Belsen at 15. What she left behind is not just a document of the Holocaust but a record of a brilliant, vain, tender, furious adolescent mind, which is precisely what makes it unbearable and essential.
The case against
Know which edition you are holding: Otto Frank cut his daughter's writing about her body, her desire, and her anger at her mother, and that sanitized text is the one schools canonized. The diary also repeats, as diaries do; months of annex squabbles and potato grievances. Its most-quoted line about human goodness gets deployed to soften an ending that deserves no softening.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
