To break out of that mold, she went on her own to Northern Ireland, where she found herself caught between warring factions of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Her first job with U.P.I., in London, was fetching coffee.Īfter digging up unusual feature articles for the news agency on her own time, she became one of the London bureau’s first female reporters - and was assigned to cover beauty pageants. Franks began her career, in the late 1960s, most women in the news business still had trouble getting serious assignments. Another influential piece, “A New Attack on Alcoholism,” which appeared in The Times Magazine in 1985, was among the first to debunk the myth that alcoholism reflected a failure of willpower as opposed to being a biochemical disease. 2, an artificial food coloring found to be a potential cause of cancer and fetal death her article led to the dye’s being banned from the nation’s food supply. In 1974 she wrote a front-page exposé for The Times on red dye No.

Franks’s piece for The New Yorker about a sensational custody case in which a Michigan couple had given up their daughter for adoption and then sought to reclaim her was made into a television movie for ABC, “The War for Baby Jessica.” Ms. She wrote an article titled “The Intimate Hillary” for the inaugural issue of Talk magazine in 1999, in which Hillary Clinton discussed her “enormous pain, enormous anger” over President Bill Clinton’s infidelities. Simpson murder trial for People magazine and interviewed lawyers for both sides. In the mid-1990s she went behind the scenes at the O.J.

Franks had a knack for zeroing in on some of the most buzzworthy topics of the day. Morgenthau, which described in some detail how their differences in age, background and occupation had blossomed into romance.Īs a journalist, Ms. She wrote several books, including “My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir” (2007), about her father’s hidden exploits as an American spy behind enemy lines in World War II, and “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me” (2014), an account of her marriage to Mr. She was a staff writer for The New York Times from 1974 to 1977 and for The New Yorker from 1992 to 2006, and she freelanced for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New York magazine and other publications.

Franks began her journalism career with United Press International, where she won her Pulitzer in 1971. He died in 2019 at 99.Ī tough and scrappy reporter with an eye for the hot story, Ms. She lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side but spent her final months in Hopewell Junction, in the Hudson Valley, at the home that the family of her husband, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Lucinda Franks, a widely published writer and investigative journalist who was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, died on Wednesday in Hopewell Junction, N.Y.

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