20 Facts About Lucinda Franks

Lucinda Laura Franks was an American journalist, novelist, and memoirist.

Lucinda Franks published four books, including two memoirs, and worked as a staff writer at The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Lucinda Laura Franks was born on July 16,1946, in Chicago.

Lucinda Franks was raised in a Christian family, the daughter of Lorraine Lois and Thomas E Franks, in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Lucinda Franks attended high school at Beaver Country Day School and graduated from Vassar College in 1968 with a degree in English.

Lucinda Franks began work at United Press International in London in 1968, where she rose from making coffee to become the bureau's first female journalist.

Lucinda Franks was initially assigned to cover beauty pageants but went on her own time to Northern Ireland as civil war broke out.

Lucinda Franks's supervisor wanted to send a male reporter to replace her, citing UPI policy that female reporters were not allowed to cover war zones, but she persuaded him that the story would be over by the time a male replacement arrived, and she was allowed to continue her work.

Lucinda Franks was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for National Reporting.

Lucinda Franks left UPI in 1974, writing on staff at The New York Times for the next three years.

Lucinda Franks freelanced for New York, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

The work was based on reporting Lucinda Franks had done at UPI.

Lucinda Franks's next book was a novel published by Random House in 1991 titled Wild Apples.

Late in her father Thomas's life, Lucinda 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.

Lucinda Franks published a book about this and other discoveries about Thomas, titled My Father's Secret War: A Memoir, in 2007.

The book draws from an extensive series of interviews Lucinda Franks conducted with her father.

Lucinda Franks talks about their marital ups and downs," though ultimately more up than down: the book, Hodgson said, was "a long love letter to [Morgenthau].

In 1977, Lucinda Franks married longtime district attorney for New York County, Robert Morgenthau.

Lucinda Franks met Morgenthau in 1973, when she interviewed him for a story about corruption in the Nixon administration.

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