Part 12: A Man of His Words

“The God’s truth is that most emergency rooms are awful….I get in trouble every time I say that and some miserable son of a bi--- quotes me in the newspaper, but it’s true. Even today you live or die depending on where you have your accident, because in most places they take you to the nearest hospital.” -- R Adams Cowley, M.D., in Shock Trauma

Shock Trauma was a kind of writing that was new to me. My reading tastes tended along the lines of long-form nonfiction; Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson. I enjoyed the science books of Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, stories by Berton Rouche about infectious disease that read like murder mysteries.

But Jon Franklin’s writing was different – dramatic and vivified. Shock Trauma had the gripping pace of a Michael Crichton action novel. It was journalism with an arc, a beginning, middle and end. Literary journalism. Franklin had an uncanny ability to capture the most minute details and make sense out of chaos in clear and concise sentences. He made complex subjects accessible and understandable.

It was a kind of distinctive writing that marked Franklin’s work since joining the Baltimore Evening Sun as a reporter in 1970 after graduating from University of Maryland. At the Evening Sun, he honed his literary journalism skills on stories about medicine and science.

Franklin’s approach was so innovative that in 1979, he was the first recipient of the Pulitzer in a new category – feature writing – for his story Mrs. Kelly’s Monster, about surgery to repair a tangle of blood vessels deep within a patient’s brain.

In 1985, he did it again. For the second time, Franklin was the first recipient of the Pulitzer in a new category: expository journalism.

Franklin left the Evening Sun the following year to teach writing in University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1989 moved to Oregon to teach and write. A few years ago Franklin was lured back to University of Maryland, where he now is the Philip Merrill Professor of Journalism.

Although Shock Trauma got my attention, another of Franklin’s books nearly had as much influence on my life: Writing for Story, about the craft of literary nonfiction. But I didn’t read that until much later.