On March 29, 1944, on the BBC program &ldquo;Radio Oranje,&rdquo; Gerrit Bolkestein, a Dutch minister in the exiled government of Prime Minister Gerbrandy, called for all Dutch citizens living under the Nazi occupation to save everyday documents &mdash; in particular, letters and diaries &mdash; for eventual collection in a national wartime archive. The archive would, he said, attest to &ldquo;what the people of Holland had suffered and overcome.&rdquo;</p><p> Among those listening to the broadcast, on a contraband radio, was 14-year-old Anne Frank. In 1942, when Anne&rsquo;s sister Margot received her summons for deportation to Westerbork, the family feigned flight to Switzerland and sequestered themselves, along with Fritz Pfeffer and three van Pelses, in the maze of rooms above Otto Frank&rsquo;s former Opekta fruit canning company. Anne brought along the checkered journal given to her a month earlier by her father, in which she would famously recount her life in hiding.</p><p> Recount and redact. Francine Prose, in &ldquo;Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife,&rdquo; takes Anne&rsquo;s story and adds to it a new perspective, that of Anne as editor, deliberate historian and exemplary writer.</p><p> The BBC broadcast awoke Anne to the possibility that her diary could be read by an audience outside of herself and her imagined friend Kitty (a character from a popular girls&rsquo; series). Though at times she doubted whether her &ldquo;unbosomings of an ugly duckling&rdquo; would be of any &ldquo;use to Messrs. Bolkestein or Gerbrandy,&rdquo; in the summer of &rsquo;44 Anne embarked on an ambitious editorial overhaul of her past two years&rsquo; worth of writing, all the while composing new entries.</p><p> According to forensic handwriting experts employed by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Anne revised and wrote up to 11 pages per day, with one eye toward her readers and another on her ever-maturing self. She included a map of the Secret Annex. Her obsession with Peter van Pels, cooled by the time of the Radio Oranje program, was recast as philosophical rather than impassioned.</p><p> With the increasing terror of possible discovery, Anne excised the girlish petty &ldquo;dramas&rdquo; of her carefree days. The history of the writing parallels that of the story. How and why Anne (and later, her father) edited is often almost as moving as the text itself.</p><p> Prose tells of returning to &ldquo;The Diary of a Young Girl&rdquo; as an adult while at work on &ldquo;Goldengrove,&rdquo; her most recent novel. &ldquo;Having written (&lsquo;Reading Like a Writer&rsquo;), a book suggesting that writers seek guidance from a close and thoughtful reading of the classics, I thought I should follow my own advice, and it occurred to me that the greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl was Anne Frank&rsquo;s diary.&rdquo;</p><p> What she found was the work of an extraordinary literary talent: Anne reveals character &ldquo;through the way a person deals with (objects),&rdquo; for example, a peeler and a few potatoes. Prose admires Anne&rsquo;s economy: Anne needs only 13 sentences to recount a scene in which she bitterly disappoints her father &mdash; he has assigned her to listen in on a worrisome Opekta meeting, and instead she falls asleep, ear pressed to the floor. </p><p>If a character is missing from Anne&rsquo;s narrative for too long, he returns just as we, the reader, begin to wonder about his absence. &ldquo;How much art is required,&rdquo; Prose asks, &ldquo;to give the impression of artlessness, how much control is necessary to seem natural?&rdquo;