In an examination of the classic Holocaust memoir, Francine Prose's "Anne Frank" combines critical analysis, biography and literary history. Although none of the facts are new, Prose offers an intriguing look at "The Diary of Anne Frank" as the memoir of a writer.

Prose, a novelist and author of "Reading Like a Writer," focuses on the growth of a teenager who recorded a list of birthday gifts when she was 13 into a writer intent on revising her manuscript for publication at 15.

In 1942, after the Germans invaded the Netherlands, the Frank family had gone into hiding. Anne's diary famously chronicles the two years before the family was betrayed and sent to concentration camps. Anne died in 1945 of typhus.

Prose's focus is on Anne's diary as both a literary classic and a manuscript that went through revision. The teen wrote: "I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is."

Prose contends writing became a way for Anne to process all that she observed and experienced while hiding. In the last three months in hiding, she wrote 324 pages of revisions and new material.

When looking at the revisions and father Otto Frank's later edition, Prose asks which one reflects Anne Frank's vision.

Her answer is that each edition is a layer — altered to reflect the hands it passed through.

One of her examples is that originally Anne gushed about "the boy upstairs" but in her later revision coolly muted her enthusiasm and deleted pages. In the edition most of us read, Otto Frank reinstated the passages about his daughter's attraction to Peter Van Pels. That emphasis on young love was dramatized with a "light touch" even more in the stage and film versions.

Prose contends that Anne's intelligence, complexity and her view of the world as "a wilderness" are always there, but not always visible in some editions of the diary.

At its best "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife" sends us back to the original. It also tells us the chapters Anne Frank did not live to write.

Susanna Bullock is a teacher and freelance writer who lives in Villa Ridge.