First edition

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the writings from a Dutch language diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (History of the Netherlands (1939-1945)). The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, the diary was retrieved by Annes father, Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family. The diary has now been published in more than 60 different languages.

First published under the title Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: diary notes from 12 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947, it received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank (play)) by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they subsequently adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version (The Diary of Anne Frank (1959 film)). The book is in several lists of the top books of the twentieth century.