Fletcher Pratt

• 1. Introduction

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  In February 1916, an Associated Press dispatch reported the arrest of Murray Fletcher Pratt in Geneva, New York. Pratt was a college student at the time. He had broken into cash drawers across town on a series of midnight runs, netting less than $25. He was eighteen years old, born on the 25th of April 1897. That arrest was just one moment in a life that moved in directions few would have predicted. Pratt became a military historian, a fantasy novelist, a naval wargame designer, and one of the most hospitable figures in mid-century American letters. The gap between the midnight burglar and the celebrated writer is the subject of this documentary.

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• 2. Buffalo, Paris, New York

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  Robert M. Pratt ran a trucking delivery service between Springville and Buffalo, New York. His son Fletcher attended public schools in Buffalo and graduated from the Griffith Institute in Springville in 1915. He enrolled that same year at Hobart College in Geneva. His time there lasted less than a year.

  The Buffalo Enquirer reported on the 23rd of February 1916 that Robert Pratt had traveled from Springville to Geneva. The paper said it was "practically decided" to send the young man to the State Hospital for the Insane at Willard. A grand jury investigation was pending. Authorities were said to believe he might be mentally unsound. What the grand jury ultimately decided is not preserved in surviving accounts.

  By May 1918, the Washington Star placed Pratt in far less dramatic circumstances. He had joined the staff of the library at the Army's Camp Meade in Maryland, coming from the Buffalo Public Library. After a period at the Buffalo Courier-Express, he settled in New York City in 1920. He worked briefly for a Staten Island newspaper before turning to freelance writing in 1923. In 1926 he married Inga Stephens, an artist who would eventually illustrate several of his books. De Camp later confirmed she was his second wife.

  A fire gutted the apartment in the early 1930s. Pratt used the insurance payout to spend a year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. On returning, he took a staff position at American Detective, a true crime magazine. He also began writing the histories that would follow him the rest of his life. One of his books bore a dedication: "To Benny DeVoto, who taught me to write." Critics noted that his prose style carried the imprint of historian Bernard DeVoto. Inga's illustrations would appear in several of those same volumes, binding her artistic work to his.

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• 3. The Naval War Game

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  Before the Second World War, Pratt designed what became known as the Fletcher Pratt Naval War Game. He built dozens of tiny wooden ships to a scale of one inch to 50 feet. Players arranged them and then calculated the outcome of engagements through a complex mathematical formula he had devised himself.

  Jack Coggins, a noted author and artist, was a frequent participant. L. Sprague de Camp first came to know Pratt through the wargaming group. That introduction eventually led to one of the more celebrated literary partnerships in American fantasy fiction.

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• 4. History and Fantasy

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  Pratt's short history of the Civil War, Ordeal by Fire, was published in 1935 to critical acclaim. It became a bestseller. Starting in the summer of 1937, he attended the annual Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. He returned each year for the next eighteen years and eventually rose to the position of Dean of Nonfiction there. During the Second World War he served as a military analyst for the New York Post and for Time magazine. Time's obituary would describe him as "bearded, gnome-like" and note that "raising marmosets" was among his listed hobbies. After the war he became a regular reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, covering historical nonfiction alongside fantasy and science fiction.

  The Harold Shea series, the most celebrated of Pratt's collaborations with de Camp, eventually appeared in collected form as The Complete Compleat Enchanter in 1989. His solo fantasy novels, The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star, are also highly regarded. His story "Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitarium" was adapted for radio by George Lefferts. It aired on Dimension X on the 22nd of September 1950. It aired again on X Minus One on the 14th of July 1955. His fiction had started in the pulp science fiction magazines of Hugo Gernsback in the late 1920s. By the mid-1950s it was finding listeners through national radio.

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• 5. The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

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  Inga Stephens Pratt's wealthy mother purchased a 31-room Victorian mansion at Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. The property sat on a high bluff above the Atlantic Ocean. After the Second World War, the Pratts came into possession of it as a summer place. They named it The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute.

  William Lindsay Gresham, John Ciardi, William Sloane, and Basil Davenport were among the regulars. So were Lester del Rey, Ted Sturgeon, Esther Carlson, Fred Pohl, John D. Clark, Willy Ley, Judith Merrill, Eugenie Clark, and de Camp. Writers moved into the bedrooms and stayed for entire summers. Laurence Manning, Pratt's writing partner from the 1930s, bought a portion of the adjacent property and settled in next door.

  The Pratts also maintained a large apartment in Midtown Manhattan near Central Park. They hosted meetings of the Hydra Club there. Manning's arrival next door had effectively extended the household into a small colony on the Atlantic Highlands bluff.

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• 6. Trap Door Spiders and the Round Table

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  Pratt established the Trap Door Spiders in 1944, a literary dining club. The name referred to the actual trapdoor spider, which enters its burrow and pulls a hatch shut behind it. Isaac Asimov later fictionalized the club as the Black Widowers in a series of mystery stories. In Asimov's story "To the Barest," Pratt appeared under the name Ralph Ottur, cast as the founder of the fictional group.

  In 1951, Pratt was a charter member of the Civil War Round Table of New York. He served as the Round Table's president from 1953 to 1954. The board of directors established the Fletcher Pratt Award in 1956, the year of his death. It is presented every May to the author or editor of the best nonfiction book on the Civil War published in the preceding year.

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• 7. The Book David Kahn Found

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  David Kahn published The Codebreakers in 1967, a landmark work on the history of cryptography. He gave full credit for his early interest in the subject to one earlier book: Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent, published in 1939. Kahn had found a copy in the public library in Great Neck, New York, as a pre-teen sometime in the 1940s. In 1978, he told the Washington Post: "It hooked me - and I never grew up." Pratt died on the 10th of June 1956. He never knew what that single library copy in Great Neck had set in motion.

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