NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Dan Frank, who as editorial director of Pantheon Books discerned in journalism and comics the potential for enduring books and introduced authors like Joseph Mitchell to tens of thousands of readers, died on May 24 in Manhattan. He was 67.

His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by cancer, his wife, Patricia Lowy, said.

Running Pantheon from 1996 until last year, Frank edited books that earned critical praise, awards and rankings on bestseller lists. He edited Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and published a translation of Marjane Satrapi’s illustrated memoir, “Persepolis” (2003), which became an acclaimed movie. He helped shape some of the historian Jill Lepore’s most popular books, among them “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” (2014), along with multiple books by acclaimed writers like Oliver Sacks and Alan Lightman.

In sophisticated comics and graphic novels, Frank discovered something of a new genre. After Art Spiegelman had great success with “Maus,” his story of the Holocaust told through comics, he helped Frank cultivate a new generation of comic artists, including Chris Ware and Ben Katchor. Frank also worked with Spiegelman on some of his subsequent books.

“He was a wonderful asset for jump-starting graphic novels the way they ought to be jump-started — by publishing the best that one can find,” Spiegelman said in a phone interview.

In 2000, The New York Times called Pantheon, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, the industry leader in graphic novels.

Frank made perhaps his most lasting mark on American letters through his work with Joseph Mitchell.

In 1984, as a young editor at Viking Press, Frank was searching the company archives for forgotten classics when he stumbled on “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a 1965 book based on two New Yorker magazine profiles by Mitchell. He decided he wanted to reissue Mitchell’s writing — only to learn that many editors had already tried and failed to do the same thing.

The New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin called Mitchell “the New Yorker reporter who set the standard.” But Mitchell, who had been hired by the magazine in 1938, had not published anything new since “Joe Gould’s Secret,” confounding his editors and admirers, who speculated that he felt he could no longer live up to his own demanding expectations as a writer.

Frank opened his courtship of Mitchell with an offer uncharacteristic for an editor: He promised not to ask whether Mitchell was working on anything.

“He was patient and he knew that you can’t really do right by a writer unless you have a strong sense of their state of mind,” Thomas Kunkel, who wrote a biography of Mitchell, said of Frank.

So began several years of lunches. Frank soothed Mitchell’s insecurities about his decades of silence and agreed to his demands about the contents and format of the book while not allowing him to delay the project interminably.




When the product of their collaboration, “Up in the Old Hotel,” came out in 1992, it spent weeks on bestseller lists and received celebratory reviews. (Mitchell died in 1996.)

“The number of readers who never would have come across the genius of Joseph Mitchell without the publication of ‘Up in the Old Hotel’ is incalculable,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in a phone interview. “He might have slipped through the cracks of literary history had it not been for Dan Frank.”

Daniel Heming Frank was born in Manhattan on March 27, 1954. His mother, Joan (Heming) Frank, produced TV shows for Hallmark and was director of publicity for the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy; his father, John, ran a travel agency.

As a high schooler, Dan took night classes in philosophy at the New School. He audited lectures given by Hannah Arendt and followed a reading list adapted from her syllabuses. “He was besotted,” Lowy said. “She was his intellectual hero.”

Frank graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1976 with a degree in philosophy. He went on to earn a master’s from the interdisciplinary program the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

He soon embarked on a career in publishing. As an editorial assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, he brought a copy of The Times to work every morning, and a young woman in the book design department would often perch on his desk to get a look at it.

That was Lowy. They married in 1982. In addition to her, he is survived by three sons, Jasper, Lucas and Cole, and one grandson. Frank lived in Manhattan.

Despite his responsibilities running Pantheon, Frank remained attentive to individual books and writers. James Gleick, for one, worked with Frank on all his books, starting in the 1980s, when Frank spotted an article that Gleick had written in The New York Times Magazine and commissioned him to expand it into a book, his first, the bestselling “Chaos: Making a New Science.”

When Gleick proposed to Frank his most recent project, which concerned time travel, Frank thought for a moment. “Oh, I see,” Gleick recalled him replying. “It’s not really going to be a book about science fiction. It’s going to be a book about time.”

That recommendation “helped me shift my thinking about the book from something that might have been a little bit trivial, something that had been done before — a survey of a bunch of science fiction literature — into something that was intended to be more ambitious,” Gleick said.

A different editor, he continued, might have thought, “There are a lot of time travel fans out there, and they’re all going to want to buy this.” Not Frank.

“Dan never thought in terms of how he could sell a book,” Gleick said. “He thought in terms of what a particular author might have in him, to make the best possible book.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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