Perhaps the "first of the post-Hiroshima doomsday authors",[1] 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.

But he again got bored by his beat, later describing it as follows:[3] I was in attendance at every major throat‐slitting, husband poisoning, and "I killed him because I loved him" episode on the Atlantic Seaboard, plus kidnappings, floods, the World Series and the opening days of Congress and at Pimlico.

[3][4][5] In 1946 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.

[2][3] His second novel, An Affair of State (1948), a spy thriller set in Washington and Soviet-occupied Hungary, appeared just four months after the start of the Berlin Airlift that signaled for most Americans the onset of the Cold War.

[7] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[14] Frank applied his experience with government and his investigatory and story-telling skills to How to Survive the H-Bomb ... and Why (1962),[1] a book whose reading suggests a non-fiction version of his research for Alas!