"Will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, for I can recapture everything when I write, my thoughts, my ideals, and my fantasies." - Anne Frank, April 5, 1944.

Though best known for her wartime diaries, Anne Frank also wrote short stores, essays, fairy tales, and the beginnings of a novel during the last years of her short life. We'll never know if she would have eventually become a great journalist or writer as an adult, but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can remind us of an undeniable potential. Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story offers a look at the literary aspirations and early promise of a 15-year-old girl who posthumously became one of the world's most famous nonfiction authors.

Opening with a simple but attractive home page, Unfinished Story offers a brief introduction, a few features complementing the main exhibition (more below), and a "Launch the Exhibition" link, which opens the Flash-based main presentation into a new window. But before you load that new page, be sure your browser's JavaScript is turned on - otherwise the "Launch" link will simply move non-JavaScript-enabled browsers on to a simple transcript of the interactive exhibition, without any helpful mentions of the Flash alternative.

The Flash presentation divides the exhibit into five stages, beginning with First Entries. Here, visitors are introduced to the writer and her family, as well as the interactive design that will take them through the rest of the exhibition. Posterized animations and high-contrast photographs populate each section, accompanied by audio clips of excerpts from Frank's writings. (These clips include a prophetic early entry, where she wrote in - and to - her 13th birthday gift, "...I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me." )

In an example of website design that may not be a practical necessity, but makes eminent visual sense, the exhibit's navigation options appear when only required or requested, and otherwise remain invisible to avoid distracting attention from more important content.

Throughout the exhibit, brief curatorial captions punctuate the audio, text, and 'hand written' excerpts, while early photographs remind us that these writings were not the work of an embedded reporter or social philosopher, but of a typical teenager. Anne can be seen skating with friends, enjoying the beach with her sister, and sitting in a garden chair as she talks to her diary about boyfriends. A brief, blurred film clip also provides the only known moving image of the writer, and again reminds us of the living person behind the iconic figure.

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