Jon D. Franklin, who elevated science writing to fine art, dies

Jon D. Franklin, two-time Evening Sun Pulitzer Prize winner and award-winning author who taught journalism at the University of Maryland, died Jan. 21 at the Hospice of the Chesapeake in Pasadena, Anne Arundel County, of complications from a fall he suffered earlier in the month.

He was 82 and also was being treated for esophageal cancer, according to his wife of 35 years, Lynn Scheidhauer Franklin, a writer.

“I am a science writer, but I don’t write about science,” Mr. Franklin said in a 2004 interview with the Nieman Foundation. “I write about people. The science is just scenery.”

“The beauty of Jon’s method was if you’re writing nonfiction, you had to care about the reporting and telling the best version of the story,” said Rafael Lorente, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at University of Maryland. “He cared about reporting stories about real people.”

Jon Daniel Franklin, the son of Benjamin Max Franklin, an electrician, and Wilma Franklin, a homemaker, was born in Enid, Oklahoma.

As a young boy, he dreamed of becoming a scientist, but instead “enrolled in what he called the ‘universal school for writers’ — the novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and the short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines of postwar America,” wrote Anne Saker, a newspaper reporter and longtime friend, in Mr. Franklin’s obituary that she penned last fall at his request.

His father purchased a used Underwood typewriter for him so he could write short stories.

In his book, “Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction,” Mr. Franklin recalled being bullied and his father advising him that in life the best defense was words not fists.

After dropping out of high school in 1959, Mr. Franklin joined the Navy and worked as a journalist aboard several aircraft carriers in the Far East. He was finally assigned as a staff writer for All Hands magazine.

After being discharged in 1967, he enrolled on the GI Bill of Rights at the University of Maryland and graduated in 1970 with honors with a degree in journalism.

He was writing for the Prince George’s Post when he joined the Evening Sun in 1970.

“In a newsroom, reporters compete fiercely for high-visibility assignments in politics and sports,” Ms. 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 the revolutionary needled editors for chasing bright shiny objects instead of stories of real life. More infuriating was the routine mishandling of science news that Franklin said contributed to the nation’s illiteracy, ‘nothing less than the deconstruction of the Enlightenment.'”

Mr. Franklin elevated science writing to a fine art as he combined scientific fact in medical-based stories with a riveting narrative, so much so, that in 1979 he received the first Pulitzer for feature writing for “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which chronicled a delicate brain surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

In 1985, he was awarded a second Pulitzer, the first for explanatory journalism, for “The Mind Fixers,” a seven-part series on molecular psychiatry.

After leaving the Evening Sun in 1986, he worked briefly as a science writer at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, before launching a second career teaching journalism at Towson University, the University of Maryland, Oregon State University, where he was department chair from 1989 to 1991, and the University of Oregon.

In 2001, he returned to Maryland where he served as the first Merrill Chair in Journalism and taught courses on science writing and complex storytelling.

He retired in 2010.

“Jon’s impact can be felt not only by all of the students who learned from him at Maryland but those all over the country who went onto award-winning careers in journalism,” Mr. Lorente said.

He was the author of two books with former Evening Sun colleague, Alan Doelp. “Shocktrauma” explored the emergency medical services unit at the University of Maryland Medical Center that was established by Dr. R Adams Cowley. Their second collaboration was “Not Quite a Miracle: Brain Surgeons and Their Patients on the Frontier of Medicine.”

Mr. Franklin was also the author of “Molecules of the Mind: The Brave New Science of Molecular Psychology” and “Guinea Pig Doctors: The Drama of Medical Research through Self-Experimentation,” written with John Sutherland, and “The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection between Humans and Dogs.”

In 1994, Mr. Franklin and his wife created an email list called WriterL, which was a “virtual salon about literary journalism,” writes Ms. Saker. It ceased operation in 2009.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.