Ruth Franklin's new bio of Anne Frank offers novel insights on the famed teenage memoirist

(This interview was originally broadcast on April 23, 2025) Journalist and author Ruth Franklin joins Midday. Her biography of the writer Shirley Jackson won the National Book Critics Circle Award nine years ago. Franklin's latest book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, is another biography. She writes about Frank, the young Jewish girl whose diary, published years after she perished in a Nazi death camp, remains the quintessential literary account of the Holocaust. Franklin's new work is wholly original and striking, particularly in its form and structure. Tom spoke with Ruth Franklin earlier this year on the Jewish observance of Yam Hashoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust. Ruth Franklin grew up in Baltimore and graduated from the Park School. She is a literary critic and former editor at The New Republic, and she teaches non-fiction writing in the MFA program at Columbia University.