Gerold Frank (August 2, 1907 - September 17, 1998) was an American author and ghostwriter. He wrote a number of celebrity memoirs and was considered a pioneer of the "as told to" form of biography. His two best-known books are The Boston Strangler, 1966, later made into a movie starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda, and an investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King in An American Death.
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Frank was born in 1907 in Cleveland. His father was a tailor and owned a dress shop. Frank graduated from Ohio State University and later moved to Greenwich Village with the hope of becoming a poet. Later he landed a job on a newspaper in Cleveland and published pieces in The New Yorker and The Nation.[1]
He married Lillian, and had two children.
Mr Frank wrote about the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. In 1934 he made a film about Jewish life in a Polish shtetl. The film had rare scenes of the Warsaw Ghetto which he later donated to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.
During World War II, he worked as a war correspondent in the Middle East, and he collaborated with Bartley Crum in the work Behind the Silken Curtain, an account of the work of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine.
He wrote a biography of Judy Garland entitled Judy and one of Zsa Zsa Gabor entitled Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story. His book I'll Cry Tomorrow, co-written with Lillian Roth and Mike Connolly was a bestseller, selling seven million copies in more than twenty languages. It was later adapted for the movies by Frank and Susan Hayward, who played the starring role.[2]
Frank won two Edgar awards from the Mystery Writers of America for his works The Boston Strangler, and The Deed, a book about the assassination of Lord Moyne.[3]
According to Mr Frank's son, he ghostwrote at least 17 books.