ABSTRACT
The Pulitzer Prize Board made its first award in the category of feature writing in 1979, to science writer Jon Franklin for his account of a surgical operation on a woman with a tangle of malformed blood vessels in her brain. His articles appeared in The Evening Sun, a Baltimore broadsheet that, like most newspapers of its day, published almost exclusively in black and white. The two-part series was accompanied by a simple illustration, the outline of a person’s head with the brain highlighted and a short phrase superimposed: “Tales from the Gray Frontier” (Franklin, 1978, C1).
