Pat Frank

Harry Hart "Pat" Frank (May5, 1907October12, 1964) was an American newspaperman, writer, and government consultant. Perhaps the "first of the post-Hiroshima doomsday authors", his best known work is his post-apocalyptic novel Alas, Babylon (1959), which depicted the outbreak of a nuclear war and the struggles of its survivors in a small central Florida town.

Journalism

Frank was born in Chicago in 1907. Named after his father who reportedly died of influenza while he was still young, Frank used and wrote under the nickname "Pat" throughout his life. He attended the Peddie School, a private prep school in New Jersey, then moved with his mother to her native northeastern Florida. Frank attended the University of Florida, took journalism courses and worked as a cub reporter for the Jacksonville Journal in Atlantic Beach, where his family had a beach house. Its protagonist was an ex-serviceman bureaucrat, a junior Foreign Service officer assigned to set up a stay-behind network in Budapest, and the CIA reckoned that it was the first work of fiction to mention the agency. It was followed by Hold Back the Night (1951), a Korean War novel about a frontline Marine unit in which Frank, perhaps unwisely, applied his World War II experiences to a country and a war he had not yet seen. It nonetheless likely got Frank a stint in Korea to help the U.S. Government with a propaganda documentary and to set up a Korean film unit. He recounted his experiences in Florida and the Far East in an autobiographical travelogue, The Long Way Round (1953). For his next book, Frank returned to the thriller with Forbidden Area (1956), which featured the landing on a north Florida beach of a group of Soviet agents specially trained to pass as Americans. Their sabotage in preparation for an invasion leads to the brink of nuclear war.

That war arrived in Frank's most popular and enduring work, Alas, Babylon (1959). One of several contemporaneous novels treating nuclear war or its aftermathTomorrow!, On The Beach, Red Alert, Fail-Safe, A Canticle for Leibowitzit recounts the war's outbreak and subsequent impact on Fort Repose, a small town in north-central Florida modeled on Mount Dora, near where Frank wrote the book. Part countdown-to-war drama, part survivalist tale, the book inspired numerous similar works and remains in print.

Film and television

A film version of Hold Back the Night was released in 1956, and one of his short stories, "The Girl Who Almost Got Away", was the basis for Howard Hawks' 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport?. Forbidden Area was adapted by Rod Serling for the 1957 debut episode of the television anthology series Playhouse 90, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Charlton Heston. The penultimate April 3, 1960, episode of Playhouse 90 featured Alas, Babylon, starring Don Murray and Dana Andrews. Several efforts to get it onto the big screen were unsuccessful.

Frank wrote the screenplay for the film We Shall Return (1963), a drama starring Cesar Romero as the patriarch of a Cuban refugee family newly arrived in Florida and their effort to organize a Bay of Pigs–type overthrow of the recently installed Castro regime.

Politics and government

After his first two novels, critics were less kind to Frank's books. But if his later work got Frank pigeon-holed as a writer of "atomic potboilers", In 1961 he was a part-time consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Council. Frank applied his experience with government and his investigatory and story-telling skills to How to Survive the H-Bomb... and Why (1962), In 1963 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,

Published works

Mr. Adam (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1946)
An Affair of State (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1948)
Hold Back the Night (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1951)
The Long Way Round (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1953)
Forbidden Area (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1956), also published as Seven Days to Never (London: Constable and Co, 1957)
Alas, Babylon (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1959)
How to Survive the H-Bomb...and Why (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962)
The Goldwater Cartoon Book (Editor). (National Publishing Company, Washington, DC, 1964)
Rendezvous at Midway: U.S.S. Yorktown and the Japanese carrier fleet (with co-author Joseph D. Harrington)(New York: The John Day Company, 1967)

References

External links

A Guide to the Pat Frank Papers, held at George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida. The collection consists of the typescripts, galley proofs and jackets from his books from Mr Adam to Alas! Babylon.