12 Facts About Pat Frank

Harry Hart "Pat" Frank was an American newspaperman, writer, and government consultant.

Pat Frank attended the Peddie School, a private prep school in New Jersey, then moved with his mother to her native northeastern Florida.

Pat Frank went north in the late 1920s and wrote for the New York World and New York Evening Journal before moving on to the Washington Herald.

Pat Frank neglected to mention his reporting on politicians and bureaucrats in the Herald, subjects that persisted even as he pursued his new interests in war, diplomacy, and foreign places.

Ever restless, Pat Frank then became a war correspondent for the ONA in Italy and covered postwar events in Austria, Hungary, and Germany.

In 1946 Pat Frank published Mr Adam, a comic, satirical novel on the response of politicians, bureaucrats, and the media when it is discovered that only one man on Earth has survived sterilization after an accidental nuclear explosion destroys most of Mississippi.

Pat Frank's light-hearted look at a grim new topic sold more than two million copies and was published in over a dozen countries.

Pat Frank recounted his experiences in Florida and the Far East in an autobiographical travelogue, The Long Way Round.

Pat Frank applied his experience with government and his investigatory and story-telling skills to How to Survive the H-Bomb.

Pat Frank was critical of the Eisenhower civil defense bureaucracy in those books, but in How to Survive the H-Bomb he praised the recent changes made by the Kennedy Administration.

In 1963 Pat Frank joined the team: he helped organize information operations for the Office of Civil Defense and was later named its public information director, resigning just before his death to work on a new book.

Apparently a fast-living, fast-spending alcoholic during his second career, Pat Frank died at age 57 of acute pancreatitis on October 12,1964, in Atlantic Beach.