Jon Franklin, pioneering apostle of literary journalism, dies at 82

Jon Franklin, an apostle of short-story-style narrative journalism whose own work won the first Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and explanatory journalism, died Sunday in Annapolis, Maryland. He was 82 years old.

His death, in hospice care, came less than two weeks after he fell at his home, his wife Lynn Franklin said. He had also been treated for esophageal cancer for two years.

As an author, teacher, reporter and editor, Mr. Franklin championed the nonfiction style that was celebrated as new journalism but was in fact vintage storytelling, an approach that he insisted would still meet old journalistic standards of accuracy and objectivity.

He communicated his ideas on the subject in 'Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction' (1986), which became a manual for literary-oriented journalists.

In 1979, Mr. Franklin won the first-ever Pulitzer for feature writing for his two-part series in The Baltimore Evening Sun entitled “Mrs. Kelly's monster.”

His vivid eyewitness account transported readers into an operating room where a surgeon's painful struggle to save the life of a woman whose brain was trapped by a tangle of blood vessels illuminated the wonders and margins of modern medicine.

He won his second Pulitzer, this time under the new category of explanatory journalism, in 1985, for his seven-part series “The Mind Fixers,” also in The Evening Sun. As he delved into the molecular chemistry of the brain and how neurons communicate, he profiled a scientist whose experiments with brain receptors could herald drug treatment and other alternatives to psychoanalysis.

Inspired by 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 theme — that using drugs to treat mental illness could make the world a healthier place — “in a snappy journalistic style , but also with a touch of humor and an often entertaining bit of cynicism. “Molecules” was one of The Times' notable books of the year.

Franklin's Writing for Story was less a preaching bible for aspiring journalists who envisioned themselves future John Steinbecks, Tom Wolfes and even Jon Franklins, but rather a demanding lesson plan on storytelling that, he wrote, would last him three decades. cost. get the hang.

“The reason we read stories is because we have developed a desire to understand the world around us,” he said in an interview for the Nieman Foundation at Harvard in 2004. “The way we do that best is through our own experiences, but when we read a good story it's like living someone else's life without taking the risk or the time.”

Critics expressed concern that emphasizing style could mean sacrificing substance. Mr. Franklin objected.

Literary journalism, he stood on it, “does not threaten the fundamental values ​​of fairness, accuracy and objectivity.” However, he cautioned that literary journalism, done properly, requires time and talent. “Not every story deserves it, nor can every reporter be trusted with it,” he wrote in the paper American Journalism Review in 1996.

“Mrs. Kelly's Monster” was published in December 1978. That year, the Pulitzer Board established a new award category to recognize “a distinguished example of feature writing in which the highest attention is paid to high literary quality and originality.” The board established the explanatory journalism award in 1984. Mr. Franklin was the first to win both.

Jon Daniel Franklin was born on January 13, 1942 in Enid, Oklahoma, the son of Benjamin and Wilma (Winburn) Franklin. His father was an electrician whose work on construction sites in the Southwest frequently uprooted the family.

John aspired to be a scientist, but because of the transience of the family, he was primarily educated in what he called the “universal school of writers”: the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the short stories in The Saturday Evening Post.

As a white minority boy in predominantly Hispanic Sante Fe, he was bullied in gang fights and given a battered Underwood typewriter by his father, who urged him to express his hostility with his fingers instead of his fists.

In 1959, John left high school to join the Navy. He served for eight years as a naval journalist aboard aircraft carriers and later interned at All Hands magazine, a Pentagon publication where, he said, a demanding editor honed his talent.

He attended the University of Maryland under the GI Bill and graduated in 1970 with a degree in journalism. He worked as a reporter and editor for The Prince Georges Post in Maryland before The Baltimore Evening Sun hired him as a rewrite man in 1970. won his Pulitzers on 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 then headed the creative writing program at the University of Oregon for a while and took a writing job at The News & Observer in Raleigh.

Once again he returned to the University of Maryland and was appointed to the first Merrill Chair in Journalism in 2001. Gene Roberts, a faculty colleague who had been editor-in-chief of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The New York Times, praised 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 Creevan 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.

Another of his books is 'The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection Between Humans and Dogs' (2000), in which he describes how the Franklins' poodle, Sam, woke the family when their house caught fire.

For a writer whose own surgical experience only went as far as having his thumb reattached after it was severed in a fall on the sidewalk, Mr. Franklin on the 'monster' aneurysm that pressed on Edna Kelly's brain, rich in detail and accessible images. The growing pressure on the artery wall, he wrote, was like “a tire about to blow, a balloon about to burst, a 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 sustenance, without which life and miracles cannot exist:

Waffles for breakfast made by Dr.'s wife. Thomas Barbee Ducker, chief brain surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital. No coffee. It makes his hands shake, Mr. Franklin wrote. Once the surgery is over, Dr. Ducker 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 sits says 1:43, and it's over.

“It's hard to say what to do. We thought about it for six weeks. But you know, there are certain things… that's as far as you can go. I just do not know.'

'He places the sandwich, the banana and the fig Newtons neatly on the table in front of him, just as the scrub nurse has laid out the instruments.

“It was triple jeopardy,” he says finally, staring at his peanut butter sandwich the same way he stared at the X-rays. “It was triple jeopardy.”

“It's 1:43 and it's over.

“Dr. Ducker bites grimly into the sandwich. He must continue. The monster won.”