Franks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for her reporting on the life of Diana Oughton, a member of Weather Underground.

[1] She was raised in a Christian family,[2] the daughter of Lorraine Lois (Leavitt) and Thomas E. Franks,[1][3][4] in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

[6] Franks began work at United Press International (UPI) in London in 1968, where she rose from making coffee to become the bureau's first female journalist.

[2][5][1] She was initially assigned to cover beauty pageants but went on her own time to Northern Ireland as civil war broke out.

[1] The resulting five-part story, written with Thomas Powers, on the life and death of Weather Underground member Diana Oughton, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971.

[4] In it the death of the family matriarch leaves an apple orchard in the hands of rival sisters; a review in Publishers Weekly wrote that "Franks earnestly and perceptively confronts real emotional situations, rendering the sisters' relationship in highly credible fashion.

"[13] Late in her father Thomas's life, 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.