Frank Lovell (1913-1998) was born on July 24, 1913, in Ipava, Illinois, a farming town where his father was a local entrepreneur. In the early 1930s Lovell attended the University of California's Berkeley campus, earning a B.A. in philosophy. Drawn into the socialist movement after the San Francisco general strike, he joined the Workers Party of the United States in 1935. He consequently became a seaman and an organizer for the Sailor's Union of the Pacific. In 1938, Lovell was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party, and played a leading role in the organization for more than five decades. For a number of years he served on national leadership bodies of the SWP, writing extensively for socialist publications on labor issues and other matters. Under the pen-name Frederick Lang he authored a study of seamen's unionism Maritime!(Pioneer Publishers, 1943). In Portland, Oregon in the late 1940s he edited The Defender, a rank-and-file paper opposing the conservatism and anti-left purges in the maritime industry and unions. In the early 1950s Frank moved to Detroit , where he became an auto worker. With George and Dorothea Breitman, Frank and his wife Sarah played a significant role in the Detroit labor and socialist movements of the 1950s and 1960s and Lovell ran for Governor of Michigan on the SWP ticket in 1954, 1958 and 1964. In the late 1960s they moved to New York City, where Frank served as the Socialist Workers Party's trade union director.

In the early 1980s, Frank and Sarah Lovell were among hundreds expelled from the SWP. In December 1983 Lovell initiated Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, first serving as editor, and later on its Board. Lovell was a leading figure of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which from 1983 to 1992 sought to bring about unification of all U.S. supporters of the Fourth International. After the group's dissolution, Lovell for a time was involved in another socialist group, Solidarity. In his final years he gave attention to creating and administering the Thomas Giunta Living Trust, named after a veteran Trotskyist seaman whom Frank had befriended some years before. Lovell died on May 1, 1998.