Jon Franklin, an apostle of short story-style narrative journalism whose own work won the first Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and expository journalism, died Sunday in Annapolis, Md. At the age of 82.
His death, in a hospice, came less than two weeks after he fell at home, said his wife, Lynn Franklin. He also had treatment for esophageal cancer for two years.
A writer, teacher, reporter and editor, Mr. Franklin espoused the style of nonfiction that was celebrated as New Journalism but was actually vintage storytelling, an approach that insisted on adhering to old journalistic standards of accuracy and objectivity.
He conveyed his thinking on the subject in Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction (1986), which became a guide for literary journalists.
In 1979, Mr. Franklin won the first Pulitzer Prize ever for a feature for his two-part series in The Baltimore Evening Sun entitled “Mrs. Kelly’s monster.”
The vivid eyewitness account transported readers into an operating theater where a surgeon’s desperate struggle to save the life of a woman whose brain was being crushed by a ruthless tangle of blood vessels illuminated the wonders and fringes of modern medicine.
He won his second Pulitzer, this time in the new category of expository journalism, in 1985 for his seven-part series ‘The Mind Fixers’, also in The Evening Sun. Investigating the molecular chemistry of the brain and how neurons communicate, he described a scientist whose experiments with receptors in the brain could herald drug therapy and other alternatives to psychoanalysis.
Inspired by Mr. Franklin’s own sessions with a psychologist, the series was adapted into a book, “Molecules of The Mind: The Brave New Science of Molecular Psychology” (1987), one of seven he wrote.
Barry L. Jacobs, professor of neuroscience at Princeton, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the author had approached his subject—that the use of drugs to treat mental illness can make the world more sane—“with a lively journalistic style, as well as a touch of humor and an often amusing bit of cynicism.” “Molecules” was among the Times Notable Books of the Year.
Mr. Franklin’s ”Writing for Story” was not so much a preachy Bible for budding journalists imagining future John Steinbecks, Tom Wolfes and even Jon Franklins as it was a demanding lesson plan for the storytelling that, he wrote, took him three decades . I become an expert in something.
“The reason we read stories is because we’ve developed a desire to understand the world around us,” he said in an interview on Nieman Foundation at Harvard in 2004. “The way we do this best is through our own experiences, but if we read a good story it’s like living another person’s life without taking the risk or the time.”
Critics expressed concern that an emphasis on style could mean sacrificing substance. Mr. Franklin tells stories.
literary journalism, he insisted, “is not a threat to the fundamental values of honesty, accuracy and objectivity”. He cautioned, however, that literary journalism done right takes time and talent. “Not every story is worth it, and not every reporter can be trusted,” he wrote to the paper American Journalism Review in 1996.
“Ms. Kelly’s Monster” was published in December 1978. That year the Pulitzer Board had created a new award category to recognize “a distinguished example of feature writing that places primary importance on high literary quality and originality.” The board created the Expository Journalism Award in 1984. Mr. Franklin was the first to win each.
John Daniel Franklin was born on January 13, 1942, in Enid, Okla., to Benjamin and Wilma (Winburn) Franklin. His father was an electrician whose work on construction sites in the Southwest often uprooted the family.
John aspired to be a scientist, but because of the family’s transience he was educated mainly in what he called “the Catholic school for writers” – the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the short stories in The Saturday Evening Post.
Bullied in gang fights as a minority white boy in predominantly Hispanic Sante Fe, he was given a battered Underwood typewriter by his father, who encouraged him to vent his hostility with his fingers instead of his fists.
In 1959, John dropped out of high school to join the Navy. He served eight years as a naval reporter on aircraft carriers and later an apprenticeship at All Hands magazine, a Pentagon publication, where, he said, a discerning editor spotted his talent.
He attended the University of Maryland on the GI Bill, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1970. He worked as a reporter and editor for The Prince Georges Post in Maryland before the Baltimore Evening Sun hired him to write again in 1970. He won Pulitzers covering science.
“I’m a science writer, but I don’t write about science,” he said the Nieman interview. “I write about people. Science is just the landscape.”
He left The Evening Sun in 1985 and returned to the University of Maryland, this time as professor and chairman of the journalism department. He went on to direct the creative writing program at the University of Oregon for a time and write for The News & Observer in Raleigh.
Returning again to the University of Maryland, he was appointed to the first Merrill Chair in Journalism there in 2001. Gene Roberts, a fellow professor who had served as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of the New York Times, hailed Mr. Franklin as “one of the greatest practitioners and teachers of feature writing in all of journalism.” He retired as a professor in 2010.
Mr. Franklin’s marriage to Nancy Crivan ended in divorce. He married Lynn Scheidhauer in 1988. In addition to his wife, his survivors include two daughters, Catherine Franklin Abzug and Teresa June Franklin, from his first marriage.
Among his other books is The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection Between Humans and Dogs (2000), in which he describes how the Franklins’ pet poodle, Sam, woke the family when their house caught fire.
For a writer whose surgical experience included reattaching his thumb after it was severed in a fall on the sidewalk, Mr. Franklin’s story about the “monster” aneurysm pressing on Edna Kelly’s brain was rich in detail. and accessible images. The increasing pressure on the arterial wall, he wrote, was like “a tire about to burst, a balloon about to pop, a ticking time bomb the size of a pea.”
Mrs. Kelly was willing to die rather than live with the monster. Her story was not about a miracle. But it begins and ends with the invocation of nutrition, without which life and miracles cannot exist:
Waffles for breakfast made by the wife of Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, chief brain surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital. No coffee. It makes his hands shake, Mr. Franklin wrote. When the surgery is over, what awaits Dr. Ducker are more medical challenges and a peanut butter sandwich that his wife had packed in a brown bag with Fig Newtons and a banana.
“Mrs. Kelly is dying,” Mr. Franklin wrote.
“The clock on the wall near where Dr. Ducker is sitting says 1:43 and it’s over.
“It’s hard to say what to do. We’ve been thinking about it for six weeks. But, you know, there are certain things… it’s as far as you can go. I just don’t know.’
“He places the sandwich, the banana, and the fig Newtons on the table in front of him, neatly, the way a nurse rubs instruments.
“It was triple jeopardy,” he finally says, looking at his peanut butter sandwich the same way he looked at X-rays. “It was triple jeopardy.”
“It’s 1:43 and it’s over.
“Dr. The duck bites, sullenly, into the sandwich. He must continue. The monster won.”