Anne Frank's Diary Was Rejected 15 Times
Quick answer: Anne Frank's diary was turned down by publisher after publisher before 1947. How Otto Frank carried his daughter's book from rejection to seventy languages.
In the summer of 1945 Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, the only member of his immediate family to survive the camps. Miep Gies, who had helped hide the family and had gathered Anne's scattered notebooks from the floor of the annexe after the arrest, handed him his daughter's diary. He read it slowly, a few pages at a time, and later said he discovered a writer he had only partly known. When he began looking for a publisher, the answers amounted to the same sentence: readers want to look forward now, not back.
The book those publishers doubted became one of the most read works of the twentieth century, translated into more than seventy languages, with reported sales beyond thirty million copies. Its path to print required a father's stubbornness, a historian's newspaper column, and a young editor pulling a manuscript out of a reject pile in Paris. Anne Frank saw none of it. She died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, at fifteen, having already revised her own manuscript with publication in mind.
A book its author prepared herself
Anne received the red-checked diary on 12 June 1942, her thirteenth birthday. Less than a month later, on 6 July, the family went into hiding in the annexe behind Otto's business premises at Prinsengracht 263. She wrote steadily for two years, addressing her entries to an imagined confidante she called Kitty, a device that gave the writing intimacy and shape from the first page.
Then, in March 1944, the Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein broadcast from London, urging his countrymen to preserve diaries and letters as testimony for after the war. Anne heard it and began systematically rewriting her diary onto loose sheets, cutting, expanding, sharpening, with a book in mind. She even chose its title: Het Achterhuis, the house behind. This matters for how we read her. The diary the world knows is not raw pages; it is a work its teenage author was consciously revising for readers.
Rejection in a ruined market
After the war Otto typed out selections, first for relatives, then for publishers. The refusals accumulated. The figure of fifteen rejections is widely repeated, though the exact count is hard to pin down across two countries and several years; what is certain is that Dutch houses declined it, and that American publishers later declined it in numbers too. The stated reasons rhymed: too painful, too soon, too particular, and who would buy the diary of an unknown child?
Some of that caution had honest roots. Paper was scarce, publishers were rebuilding, and Europe was exhausted by its own history. But at bottom the rejections rested on a guess about readers, and the guess was wrong. Gatekeepers estimate markets; they do not report them. Publishers have repeated this particular misjudgment, in gentler forms, in every era since.
One newspaper column changes everything
The typescript found its way to Jan Romein, a Dutch historian. On 3 April 1946 he published a short front-page piece in the newspaper Het Parool called Kinderstem, a child's voice, arguing that this one diary embodied the reality of the occupation more powerfully than official evidence could. Publishers who had shown no interest began telephoning within days.
Contact, an Amsterdam house, published Het Achterhuis on 25 June 1947 in a printing of about three thousand copies. It was a modest beginning, but the book found readers and did not stop finding them. French and German editions followed in 1950, each one widening the circle.
The reject pile in Paris
The English-language story turned on one more advocate. At Doubleday's Paris office, a young editorial assistant named Judith Jones found the diary in a pile of rejected material, read it through in an afternoon, and pressed her superiors to take it, an episode she recounted throughout her celebrated editing career. Doubleday published The Diary of a Young Girl in the United States in 1952, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even then, its American fortunes were made by a reader, not a marketing plan. The novelist Meyer Levin's passionate front-page review in the New York Times Book Review in June 1952 sent the first printings out of stock. A Broadway adaptation followed in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, a film came in 1959, and the diary settled permanently into the world's bookshelves and classrooms.
What a working writer can take from this
Told as a publishing story, every stage of the diary's survival depended on one particular person refusing to let it drop: Miep Gies keeping the notebooks safe, Otto typing and retyping, Romein giving a page of his newspaper, Jones fishing it from the reject pile, Levin shouting from a front page. Books rarely travel by consensus. They travel hand to hand, reader by reader, and a writer's task includes finding those single readers rather than waiting for a committee to agree.
The other lesson belongs to Anne herself. Under strain that most of us cannot imagine, she kept a daily practice, and she revised. The gap in maturity between her earliest entries at thirteen and her rewritten pages at fifteen is visible on the page, and it came from deliberate work. Her device of the addressee is worth stealing outright: writing to Kitty turned private notes into prose with a pulse, because even a diary gains urgency when it is written to someone.
Reading it as a writer
Modern scholarly and definitive editions present Anne's first version and her own revised version side by side, and for a writer this is the rare chance to watch a gifted young author edit herself. Notice what she cuts, what she expands, how she sketches the annexe's residents with a few exact strokes, and how the entries build scenes rather than merely logging days. Read it once as history, then again, slowly, as craft. It rewards both readings, and it will change how seriously you take your own notebook.
What poets can take from this
- Give your journal an addressee; Anne's letters to Kitty show how an imagined reader disciplines prose.
- Revise even private writing; the diary the world reads is substantially Anne's own second draft.
- When editors say there is no market for a subject, remember they are guessing about readers, not reporting them.
- Seek single advocates for your work rather than broadcasting to everyone; this book was carried person to person at every stage.
- Date everything you write; the record itself may one day be the work.
Try it yourself
For seven consecutive evenings, write ten dated lines to a named imaginary confidant about the day you actually had. On the eighth day, revise the strongest entry as though a stranger will read it, because one day a stranger might.
Questions
How many publishers rejected Anne Frank's diary?
The commonly cited figure is fifteen rejections, spread across Dutch and later American publishers, though exact counts vary between accounts. What is well documented is that multiple Dutch houses declined it before Contact's 1947 edition, and several American publishers passed before Doubleday took it in 1952.
How did Anne Frank's diary finally get published?
The historian Jan Romein wrote a front-page article about the typescript, Kinderstem, in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946, and publisher interest followed immediately. Contact of Amsterdam published Het Achterhuis on 25 June 1947 in a first printing of about three thousand copies.
Did Anne Frank want her diary to be published?
Yes. After hearing a March 1944 radio appeal to preserve wartime diaries, she began rewriting her own for publication, chose the title Het Achterhuis, and edited her earlier entries. She wrote openly of wanting to become a journalist and a writer.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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