Rose Franken
Rose Franken was a notable American writer born in 1895 in Gainesville, Texas. Initially named Rosebud Dougherty Lewin, she moved to New York City after her parents' separation and eventually married Sigmund Walter Anthony Franken, with whom she faced the challenges of his tuberculosis. After his death in 1933, Franken had already begun her literary career, achieving recognition with her novel *Pattern*, despite initial rejections. Her successful play *Another Language* debuted on Broadway in 1932, marking the beginning of her prominent presence in theater. Throughout her career, she faced a dichotomy in public reception; her more serious and psychologically complex works, such as *Outrageous Fortune* and *When Doctors Disagree*, were less well-received than her sentimental romances. Her most successful creations were the *Claudia* stories, which were adapted into a Broadway play and films. Franken's ability to write across various formats, from novels to scripts and plays, highlighted her versatility, even as her more challenging themes often struggled to find an audience.
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Rose Franken
Playwright
- Born: December 28, 1895
- Birthplace: Gainesville, Texas
- Died: June 22, 1988
- Place of death: Tucson, Arizona
Biography
The irony in Rose Franken’s creative life was that her most thoughtful, intelligent, and psychologically penetrating writing received less public acceptance than her sentimental romances. Franken was born Rosebud Dougherty Lewin in Gainesville, Texas, in 1895, the youngest of Michael and Hannah Younker Lewin’s four children. The family moved to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood when her parents separated and her mother took the children to their grandparents’ home. Franken attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, after which, in 1913, she married Sigmund Walter Anthony Franken, an oral surgeon suffering from tuberculosis. After they spent the first ten months together in a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, Franken’s disease was in remission. The couple had three sons and Sigmund died of tuberculosis in 1933.
By then, Franken had already established herself as a writer. Her novel, Pattern, was rejected by many publishers until the legendary publisher, Maxwell Perkins, accepted it for Scribner’s. Good Housekeeping, which had turned down her first submission, later paid Franken five thousand dollars for the same story. Franken also began to write plays. The first was optioned but never produced. The second, a collaboration with her aunt, Jane Lewin, was published but not produced. Finally, in 1932, her third play, Another Language, made it to Broadway and ran for 453 performances.
With the death of her husband, Franken moved to California, where she became a scriptwriter, earning two thousand dollars a week during the Depression. During her time in Hollywood, she met her second husband, William Brown Meloney, whom she married in 1937, and with whom she collaborated on a number of plays and film scripts. Franken’s most important works were her play, Outrageous Fortune, and a novel she wrote with her husband, When Doctors Disagree. The former dealt with two topics considered taboo in the early 1940’s: anti-Semitism and homosexuality. When Gilbert Miller, the play’s initial producer, pulled out, Franken’s husband took over as its producer, with Franken its director. The play opened to sold-out audiences, but interest faded quickly and the show closed after seventy-seven performances. When Doctors Disagree concerns the dilemma of Dr. Ferris, a female physician, who tries to juggle a medical career with life as a housewife. She promises her fiancee that she will abandon her career when they marry. Finally, her fiancee relieves her of this commitment after she saves the life a child on whom other doctors have failed to cure. The play closed after twenty-eight performances.
Franken’s Claudia stories were her most commercially successful ventures. These eight novels spawned the Broadway hit, Claudia, and two films, Claudia, and Claudia and David. The Claudia stories are essentially romances aimed at a readership of housewives. Franken was remarkably productive. She had the flexibility to write novels, film scripts, and plays that were commercial successes, but when she ventured into the areas that proved most challenging, despite the excellence of her writing, she lost her audiences.