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John D. Franklin, a two-time Evening Sun Pulitzer Prize winner and award-winning author who taught journalism at the University of Maryland, died on January 21 at Chesapeake Hospice in Pasadena, Anne Arundel County. He died due to complications caused by. The damage occurred at the beginning of the month.
He was 82 years old and was also being treated for esophageal cancer, said his wife of 35 years, author Lynn Scheidhauer Franklin.
“I’m a science writer, but I don’t write about science,” Franklin said in a 2004 interview with the Nieman Foundation. “I write about people. Science is just scenery.”
Rafael Lorente, dean of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill School of Journalism, said, “The beauty of John’s method is that when you write nonfiction, you have to be careful about reporting and telling the best version of the story.” ” he said. “He was interested in reporting stories about real people.”
John Daniel Franklin was born in Enid, Oklahoma, the son of Benjamin Max Franklin, an electrician, and Wilma Franklin, a housewife.
As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a scientist, but instead studied in what he called the “universal school for writers”: the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and “Saturday Evening.”・His short stories were published in the Post and other popular postwar magazines. America,” Anne Saker, a newspaper reporter and longtime friend, wrote in an obituary written at Mr. Franklin’s request last fall.
His father bought him a used Underwood typewriter so he could write short stories.
In his book, “Writing for Stories: The Ingenious Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction,” Mr. Franklin describes a time when he was being bullied and his father advised him that the best defense in life was not his fists but his words. I’m reminiscing about what happened.
After dropping out of high school in 1959, Mr. Franklin joined the Navy and worked as a journalist on several aircraft carriers in the Far East. He was eventually appointed as a staff writer for All Hands magazine.
After being discharged from the military in 1967, he enrolled in the GI Bill of Rights at the University of Maryland and graduated magna cum laude in 1970 with a degree in journalism.
When he joined the Evening Sun in 1970, he was writing for the Prince George’s Post.
“In newsrooms, reporters compete fiercely for high-profile jobs in politics and sports,” Saker wrote. “For Franklin, science was the only frontier worth patrolling. But, to his eternal frustration, newspapers too often did the easy thing and celebrated the trivial.
“Franklin was a revolutionary editor who threaded the needle to chase bright, shiny objects rather than real-life stories. Even more infuriating is the routine mishandling of science news, and Mr. Franklin He said that it contributed to the illiteracy of the people, which was “nothing short of the dismantling of the Enlightenment.”
Mr. Franklin elevated science writing to an art form by combining scientific facts and compelling storytelling in medically based stories, winning his first Pulitzer Prize for best full-length screenplay in 1979 for “Mrs. Martin.” . Kelly’s Monster chronicles a delicate brain surgery performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
In 1985, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, the first for his seven-part series on molecular psychiatry, The Mind Fixers.
After leaving the Evening Sun in 1986, he worked briefly as a science writer at the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and then went on to become a second-year journalism professor at Towson University, the University of Maryland, and Oregon State University. Started my career. He was a professor at the University of Oregon from 1989 until 1991.
He returned to Maryland in 2001 to serve as the inaugural Merrill Chair in Journalism, teaching courses on science writing and complex storytelling.
He retired in 2010.
“John’s influence will be felt not only by all of the students who studied with him at Maryland, but also by students across the country who went on to award-winning careers in journalism,” Lorente said.
He is the author of two books with former Evening Sun colleague Alain Doerp. “Shock Trauma” featured the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Department of Emergency Medical Services, founded by Dr. R. Adams Cowley. Their second collaboration was “No Miracle: Neurosurgeons and Their Patients on the Front Lines of Medicine.”
Mr. Franklin is also the author, with John Sutherland, of The Molecules of the Mind: The Brave New Science of Molecular Psychology, The Guinea Pig Doctor: The Drama of Medical Research Through Self-Experimentation, and The World of Wolves. Parlor: The eternal bond between humans and dogs. ”
In 1994, Mr. Franklin and his wife created an email list called WriterL, “a virtual salon for literary journalism,” Mr. Saker wrote. It stopped operating in 2009.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
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