Born in 1897, Fletcher was raised on his parents’ farm located on the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, near Akron, NY.  His full name was Murray Fletcher Pratt, an expansive moniker little-known to most people.  Little is also known about his immediate family.  His line of descent followed the New England Pratts who came to Western New York in the early 1800s and included Samuel Pratt (1787-1822), who had married Sophia Fletcher, daughter of a distinguished Revolutionary War general, and Samuel Pratt’s son, Samuel Fletcher Pratt (1807-1872), who had partnered in the saddlery hardware trade with none other than William Letchworth.

Early on, Pratt moved to Buffalo where he worked as a librarian at the Buffalo Public Library. Short-statured, but wirery and muscular, he also entered the ring as a flyweight boxer. There he succeeded in knocking out one opponent while losing a tooth or two over the course of a three-fight win streak.  Appraised of this moonlighting, the head librarian gave him a Hobson’s choice: books or the canvas.  Out of economic necessity, he remained library-bound, but resenting that edict Fletcher would later get revenge.  In a June 1928 article in H.L. Menken’s American Mercury titled, “A Glance at the Public Libraries,” he opined that with librarians “small minds are at work, and sure enough, there is a certain lack of intelligence among librarians.”

In 1915, Pratt entered Hobart College in Geneva, NY. There the athletic director, aware of his pugilistic talent, dragooned the lad into the role of boxing coach.  Unfortunately, Fletcher was forced to abandon his college career after that freshman year due to a lack of funds.  He next labored for the Library War Service during World War I, distributing books to troops on the home front.  Following that, he worked as a reporter for the Buffalo Courier Express until, in 1920, he moved to New York City. There he worked as a reporter for a Staten Island paper, wrote installments for a biographical dictionary, and rated novice writers through a classified ad “writer’s institute” of dubious distinction. 

In 1926, Fletcher married the talented Bloomingdale’s fashion artist Inga Marie Stephens, taking on a lifelong partner in his personal, literary and social affairs.  The pair made a contrasting sight when the elegant Inga accompanied the tweedy Fletcher, whose “small size, whiskers, tinted glasses, and loud shirts made an ensemble not easily forgotten.”  Inga lent her artistic talent to illustrating several of Fletcher’s works and co-authored two science fiction stories with him. It was claimed by one observer that she was responsible for whatever coherence much of his sci-fi output exhibited.  This may be true, for another, more-famous co-author of Pratt’s, L. Sprague de Camp noted: “A fan magazine once asserted that [de Camp] furnished the imaginative element and Pratt the controlling logic.  Actually, it was the other way around.  Pratt had a livelier and more creative imagination than I, but I had a keener sense of critical logic.”

Following their wedding, Fletcher and Inga moved into a large and roomy Manhattan apartment.  There, one room accommodated a troop of caged marmosets, diminutive South American monkeys. Fletcher relaxed each day feeding them Ritz crackers and chatting with them. The Pratts were a convivial couple, and their apartment soon became the center of lively get-togethers by a stunning group of authors and literati. It included numerous Golden Age science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, L. Sprague de Camp, John Drury Clark, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Ray, Laurence Manning (a Canadian sci-fi author who partnered with Fletcher on several stories) and L. Ron Hubbard (in his pre-Scientology manifestation). Willy Ley, whose factual explanations of rocket science appeared as articles in Galaxy Science Fiction and Astounding Stories was also an attendee. (In 1949 Ley authored a book called The Conquest of Space. One of the images in it shows a large manned rocket soaring over Buffalo at night on its way into space). New York book-scene luminaries such as book publisher William Sloane, Book of the Month Club editor Basil Davenport and Harper’s Magazine editor, columnist, historian and Mark Twain authority Bernard DeVoto were also guests.

Shelves lining the walls of the apartment held hundreds of little wooden warship models, including battleships, cruisers and destroyers, that had been hand-carved by Fletcher.  These were used in an intricate naval wargame he designed.  Several members, including Pohl, Clark and de Camp, calved off from the larger Pratt social iceberg and became avid game players. Joined by professional Navy officers, they threw themselves onto the Pratt’s living room floor and maneuvered the toy ships, firing imaginary gun and torpedo salvoes from vessel to vessel.  Fletcher refereed the action, stopwatch and tape measure in hand. Accuracy of salvoes were judged and models were “missed,” “hit and survived,” or “sunk.” Amusingly, the professional naval officers were often eliminated from the game early, much to their chagrin. Soon the lady observers who were present became active participants and were judged to be the most ferocious players. The Naval War College adopted Pratt’s divertissement as a training tool, and it was eventually marketed to the public as Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game.  This later event sparked a craze that swept the country from New York to California and which lasted for years. The Pratt mélange subsequently grew to 50 members and moved to a rented hall, and the intensity of the of the enthusiasm was illuminated in the Buffalo wargaming experience:

During the war the game caught on all over the country.  Naval ROTC units played it in armories. One, in Buffalo, had spectators, refreshments, a band and a big scoreboard to see who was getting sunk.

Fletcher’s science fiction output started in the Paleolithic era of the sci-fi pulps in the late 1920s and continued throughout the 1930s.  It was interrupted by World War II and resumed for a while in the early 1950s. Altogether, he authored or co-authored dozens of sci-fi short stories or novellas, which appeared in pulps such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. The “Octopus Cycle,” a novella that launched Fletcher’s science fiction writing career (and which Fletcher’s friend, John Drury Clark, called “the second worst sci-fi story ever written”), was published in the May 1928 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s  Amazing Stories. In it an implausible regiment of land-dwelling octopi attack a jungle military fortress. 

Prior to its publication, Pratt had been working for Gernsback translating German and French sci-fi novels into English, which Gernsback would then serialize in Amazing Stories. (Fletcher had an easy facility with foreign languages, including German, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic). Gernsback, now known as the Father of Modern Science Fiction, had coined the term “science fiction” and started publication of the first two sci-fi pulps, Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. He was notoriously tight-fisted, doling out mere fractions of pennies per word for translations or original stories.  He also often neglected to make any payment at all for published works. Fletcher, desperate for money, circumvented this by submitting the first half of a serial, which Gernsback would publish, and then holding back on the second half until he was paid in full.

Other Pratt science fiction tales included “The City of the Living Dead,” published in the May 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. It described a society of people addicted to dreams supplied by electrical hookups, which in turn provided the idea for our contemporary Matrix films. Postwar tales included “Asylum Satellite,” one of the first descriptions of a functioning space station in the October 1951 Wonder Stories, and “The Seed From Space” in the May 1951 Startling Stories.

Unfortunately, in 1937, the Pratt’s apartment caught fire. Undaunted, they used the insurance money to subsidize a sabbatical to the University of Paris.  There, Fletcher studied Napoleonic history, an effort that would result in a two-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Reviewing the second volume, Columbia history professor Leo Gershoy said:

To an old, almost overly familiar story, . . . [Pratt] brings the talents of a novelist or biographer – and those of an unusually lucid writer on military affairs. Though he goes to some effort not to disclose his excellent scholarship, the body of his learning is both seen and sensed under the literary adornment, and that revelation too is far from displeasing to this professional eye.

Other successful Fletcher Pratt biographies included Hail Caesar! and The Third King, a biography of Denmark’s Vlademar IV, “a forgotten king whose sword, ships, and laws helped establish freedom in the Western world.”

Interestingly, while in Paris Fletcher generated a manuscript that would be published in 1939 as Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers. The book was so good at explaining the intricacies of code making and breaking at a fundamental level that it was removed from sale and libraries by the American and British governments for the duration of World War II.

Fletcher’s pulp magazine career also included essays in the non-fiction arena, for example his 1935 string of articles in American Detective describing investigations by the famous New Jersey police detective Ellis Parker, who had successfully run to ground over 300 criminals.  By the mid-1930s, Pratt was a known entity in the pulp authorship community, not an easy living as he himself admitted in 1937. “The fact is that writing for the pulps is a dog’s life,” he observed, “and very few stay in it who can escape.” 

In that same mid-1930s period, then, he made successful submissions to a stable of more staid military and naval professional journals such as Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, The Marine Corps Gazette and The Field Artillery Journal.  This started him on an enduring career as a military-naval journalist and book author that would last until the end of his life. These efforts included extensive military correspondences during World War II to Harpers, Time and the New York Post. It also included the authorship of books, including: The Lost Battalion (1938), Sea Power and Today’s War (1939), Fighting Ships of the U.S. Navy (1941), The U.S. Army: A guide to its Men and Equipment (1942), Eleven Generals: Studies in American Command (1942), The Navy Has Wings: United States Naval Aviation (1943), The Marines’ War: An Account of the Struggles for the Pacific from Both American and Japanese Sources (1948), and War For the World: A Chronicle of Our Fighting Forces in World War II (1956) among numerous others.

Fletcher Pratt’s most famous co-author was L. Sprague de Camp.  Tall, ruggedly handsome and militarily erect, de Camp possessed a degree in aeronautical engineering, but like Pratt he had found a home in the science fiction pulp community (he is credited with first using the terms “extraterrestrial” and “E.T.” as nouns in science fiction).  Also, like Pratt, Sprague de Camp held an interest in naval affairs, and so it was ordained that the two should meet on the floor of Fletcher’s apartment, pushing tiny warships around.  

A blossoming friendship found the two plotting to co-author a series of fantasy stories based on the parallel universe adventures of a dorky psychologist named Harold Shea.  These Harold Shea novels appeared in Unknown magazine and included “The Roaring Trumpet” (1940), “The Mathematics of Magic” (1940) and “The Castle of Iron” (1941).  Two other Shea stories emerged over the years, and the series has been anthologized in the book, The Complete Enchanter (1988). 

Pratt and De Camp would also publish a book-length fantasy novel titled Land of Unreason and an anthology of humorous short stories that had first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Illustrated by Inga Stephens Pratt and titled Tales from Gavagan’s Bar, in it the bar’s customers include Mr. Maguire, who brought his own leprechaun with him from Ireland; Mrs. Vacarescu, whose husband was a were-dachshund; and Mr. Murdoch, who borrowed a very small dragon to rid his apartment of mice, and lost it.

In 1948, under the pseudonym George U. Fletcher, Pratt published his solo fantasy novel magnum opus, The Well of the Unicorn, which predated C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Stylistically replete with archaisms, “sentences of Teutonic length,” and frequent plotting gaps, The Well is not an easy read.  It is, however, “a warning against the solution of problems by easy answers, shortcuts, or gimmicks.”  Both its hero, the youth Airar, and his companion, the wizard Meliboe, possess sorcery talents.  Their magic spells, however, fail spectacularly. The “Well” of the tale’s title ostensibly brings peace to all who drink from it, but it is never visited.  Its powers, by implication, are as illusory as the unicorn creature associated with it.  Also, reflecting upon the popular Conan the Barbarian stories of that era, Pratt concluded that “he had little use for heroes who merely battered their way out of traps by means of bulging thews, without using their brains.”  Airar, then, is thrown back on his intellect, and wins the day.  As L. Sprague de Camp noted in Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers:  

The story contains much more than derring-do.  Characters argue out questions of good and evil, authority and voluntary agreement, and free will versus predestination. The central theme is philosophy of government: how to organize men to fight effectively for freedom without losing freedom in the process. These questions are discussed with considerable subtlety, since Fletcher’s sharp mind had thought much about them.

Upon their return from Paris in 1938, Fletcher and Inga had rented another Manhattan apartment, where the marmosets reestablished residence, literati and gamesters congregated and the written word poured forth in an irresistible stream.  In 1946, the couple went in search of a more spacious abode and found it in a waterfront mansion in Highlands, NJ. A 30-room house whose expansive lawn sloped down to the Shrewsbury River, Fletcher whimsically dubbed it the “Ipsy Wipsy Institute.” An Anglophile, Fletcher ran the Ipsy Wipsy like a classic English manor house.  A band of guests would arrive each Friday afternoon and spend the weekend being wined and dined in amiable style. Gracie, the Pratt’s cook, laid out pleasurable breakfasts, lunches and dinners. A cocktail hour was observed, and port passed after dinner.  Lazy days were spent sipping coffee, playing board games, swimming and feeding marmosets. Fletcher would sit, flipping cards into a hat or pecking out paragraphs on his typewriter while conversing with guests.  

An epicure, Fletcher co-authored A Man and His Meals: The Fine Art of Eating in 1948.  It was part culinary history and part cookbook without recipes.  Illustrated by Inga, for kitchen warriors it makes a fascinating read.  Laughingly, when it came to fulfilling the book’s promise of culinary excellence, Fletcher fell short in his application of such endeavors. As Frederick Pohl pointed out:

Fletcher was sometimes a quite awful cook. You have not tasted bouillabaisse until you have had Fletcher’s version, in which you would not be surprised to find that the fish were still merrily swimming around in their lukewarm pot.   

In 1935, Pratt published Ordeal by Fire: An Informal History of the American Civil War, which was immediately labeled “The best one-volume history of the Civil War” by Bernard DeVoto. Fletcher’s Ordeal is still being published today, 84 years after its origination, as A Short History of the Civil War. In it, Fletcher exhibited the height of his nonfiction talents. Included were lyrical passages such as this:  

You shall not imagine, either, that all is abounding grace and united effort within the Confederacy.  Where are our little luxuries, our silks, our wheaten bread, our breakfast coffee?  The sun wheels from east to west, the seasons pass, the long tide of victory flows in and the Yankees can never conquer us; but still the northern sky is red with war and our husbands and our sons march away to return no more.  

In contrast, Pratt could also mix a muscular journalistic style with romantic military imagery.  For example:

 [The Confederates swept] up the slopes, mass after mass, shouting in fearless passion of sure triumph.  . . . [Union general George H.] Thomas rode soberly along the line, “steady there, steady.  Shoot low and pick your man.”  Mass after mass the waves of assault rolled back, then up again, through the long afternoon.  Thomas’ regiments had frayed to a single thin line; officers were handling muskets like privates, Granger’s reserve had come and been used up too, but whenever any of them looked up, there he was, strong and impassive against the red twilight over the mountains, looking ten feet tall to their superheated imaginations, literally carrying the whole army on his shoulders.  At dark the ammunition ran out; the dead were robbed of their bullet-pouches, and that ammunition was gone too, with a circle of red flashes picking out the crest of one more charge from Longstreet.  “Fix bayonets!” ordered Thomas quietly, and cocked his pistol.  The last charge struck, there was a boiling melee of clubbed muskets and silver-flashing bayonets under a solemn harvest moon, and then that charge, too, rolled back down the hill and the Union army was saved. 

Other entries in Fletcher’s Civil War oeuvre included the iconoclastic Stanton: Lincoln’s Secretary of War, The Civil War in Pictures (with explanatory text) and Civil War in Western Waters.  He also produced two young-adult Civil War histories: The Monitor and the Merrimac, and the vividly-illustrated The Civil War.

In his drive to educate a youthful readership, Fletcher turned his talents to explaining real-life technology and science. Two such volumes were All About Famous Inventors and Their Inventions and All About Rockets and Jets. Two other immensely attractive books on rocket science and its potential—Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships and By Space Ship to the Moon—had preceded these. Both books were illustrated by the renowned artist, Jack Coggins, who had been an avid naval war gamer in Fletcher’s apartment and had illustrated Fighting Ships of the U.S. Navy. Pratt’s knowledge of rocket science was well-founded. In 1930, he was one of the nine founders of the American Interplanetary Society, predecessor today’s American Rocket Society.  Its members had received a 1936 French Astronomical Society award “in recognition of their pioneering tests with liquid fuel rockets.”

As an increasingly famous author in the 1940s and 1950s, Fletcher was also sought out to do book reviews of histories, fantasy novels and science fiction works. These efforts made frequent appearances in the New York Times Review of Books and in The Saturday Review of Literature. In 1937, he was engaged by the renowned poet Robert Frost to be the dean of nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Held under the auspices of Vermont’s Middlebury College, “Bread Loaf” had started at the urging of Frost, who lived nearby. There, Fletcher spent 18 summers encouraging tyro authors by sharing his expertise in writing and marketing in the nonfiction arena, while reading and critiquing submitted manuscripts.

Fletcher Pratt, that remarkable Western New Yorker, passed away suddenly from cancer in 1956 at the age of 59. Largely self-educated, the depth and breadth of his knowledge and the scale of his literary output was truly amazing.  His funeral was attended by a host of Golden Age science fiction authors, New York literati and naval officers.  Saddened, Inga Stephens Pratt sold the Ipsy Wipsy, lacking the heart to remain there without her life’s companion. His legacy, however, can still be found within the covers of highly collectible sci-fi pulps, treasured fantasy novels and a broad swath of eminently readable narrative histories and biographical gems.