Biography of Pat Frank
"Author, journalist, and government consultant, Harry Hart, who wrote books and stories under the pseudonym Pat Frank, was born in Chicago in 1907. He spent most of his early career in Florida, apart from a couple of years in New York and Washington (and service overseas during World War II, when he worked for the Office of War Information and was a correspondent in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Turkey). After the war, he returned to work as a domestic journalist but also began writing nonfiction books, using the name Pat Frank, in which he took on the Washington bureaucracy and challenged many assumptions about how well the government functioned. These works led to his speculative fiction and stories such as Forbidden Area, which posited the notion of America falling victim to a sneak Soviet military attack. Hart's most popular work is the novel Alas, Babylon, which tells the story of ordinary Americans in an isolated Florida community coping with survival following a Soviet-American nuclear war. For all of his criticisms of the government, Hart was respected enough to be employed as a consultant by the Department of Defense and NASA. Alas, Babylon has seen dozens of printings since its original publication in 1959, and was still in print in 1999, some 35 years after its author's death" (Eder 1).