Fletcher Pratt

3 universes Last reviewed 2026-10-02

Fletcher Pratt was born April 25, 1897, near Tonawanda, New York, and raised in Buffalo, the son of Robert M. Pratt, who operated a trucking service between Springville and Buffalo. He graduated high school in 1915 from Griffith Institute in Springville and attended Hobart College in Geneva, New York, for one year before leaving under difficult circumstances. He worked at the Buffalo Public Library, then joined the library staff at the Army's Camp Meade in 1918, and subsequently worked for the Buffalo Courier-Express and a Staten Island newspaper before becoming a freelance writer in 1923, selling stories to pulp magazines published by Hugo Gernsback in the late 1920s. Pratt achieved his first major commercial success with the Civil War history Ordeal by Fire (1935), and became known within fantasy fiction for the Harold Shea series, humorous adventures across mythological worlds co-written with L. Sprague de Camp, as well as his solo fantasy novels The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star. He served as Dean of Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference from 1937 to 1955, worked as a military analyst for the New York Post and Time magazine during World War II, and reviewed books regularly for the New York Times. He founded the Trap Door Spiders literary dining club in 1944. The Fletcher Pratt Award for Civil War nonfiction was established in his honor in 1956. He died June 10, 1956, in Long Branch, New Jersey, at age fifty-nine.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) · The Harold Shea Series Core Canon
• The Well of the Unicorn (1948) · The Well of the Unicorn Core Canon
• The Castle of Iron (1950) · The Harold Shea Series Core Canon
• The Blue Star (1952) · The Blue Star Core Canon
• Wall of Serpents (1960) · The Harold Shea Series Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 5 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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