Lucinda Franks

Lucinda Laura Franks (July 16, 1946 – May 5, 2021) was an American journalist, novelist, and memoirist. Franks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for her reporting on the life of Diana Oughton, a member of Weather Underground. With that award she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer for National Reporting, and the youngest person ever to win any Pulitzer. She published four books, including two memoirs, and worked as a staff writer at The New York Times (1974 to 1977) and The New Yorker (1992 to 2006).

Early life and education Lucinda Laura Franks was born on July 16, 1946, in Chicago. She was raised in a Christian family, the daughter of Lorraine Lois (Leavitt) and Thomas E. Franks, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. While at Vassar, she cofounded a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Career Franks began work at United Press International (UPI) in London in 1968, where she rose from making coffee to become the bureau's first female journalist. She was also the first woman to win the Pulitzer for National Reporting. writing on staff at The New York Times for the next three years.

Franks's first book, Waiting Out a War: The Exile of Private John Picciano (1971), tells the story of a deserter in the Vietnam War. A review for Kirkus Reviews, calling Waiting Out a War a "book with more integrity than insight", emphasized how unremarkable Picciano's story was.

Late in her father Thomas's life, Franks discovered that he had been a secret agent for the US military during World War II, sent to pose as an officer of the SS and report on a subcamp of Buchenwald. Franks published a book about this and other discoveries about Thomas, titled My Father's Secret War: A Memoir, in 2007.

Franks died of cancer on May 5, 2021, in Hopewell Junction, New York, aged 74.