Games - Fletcher Pratt

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Murray Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was a science fiction and fantasy writer; he was also well-known as a writer on naval history and on the American Civil War.

According to L. Sprague de Camp, Pratt was born near Buffalo, New York and attended Hobart College for one year. During the 1920s he worked for the Buffalo Courier-Express and on a Staten Island newspaper. In the late 1920s he began selling stories to pulp magazines. Again, according to de Camp's memoir, when a fire gutted his apartment in the 1930s he used the insurance money to study at the Sorbonne for a year. After that he began writing histories.

Wargamers know Pratt as the inventor of a set of rules for civilian naval wargaming, before the Second World War. De Camp met him through his wargaming group.

Pratt established the literary dining club known as the Trap Door Spiders in 1944. The name is a reference to the exclusive habits of the trapdoor spider, which when it enters its burrow pulls the hatch shut behind it. The club was later fictionalized as the Black Widowers in a series of mystery stories by Isaac Asimov. Pratt himself was fictionalized in one story, To the Barest, as the Widowers’ founder, Ralph Ottur.

Pratt is best known for his fantasy collaborations with de Camp, the most famous of which is the humorous Harold Shea series, was eventually published in full as The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989, ISBN 0-671-69809-5). His solo fantasy novels Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star are also highly regarded.

Novels

The Land of Unreason (1941) with L. Sprague de Camp
Well of the Unicorn (1948)
The Carnelian Cube (1948) with L. Sprague de Camp
The Blue Star (1952)
Double Jeopardy (1952)
The Undying Fire (1953)
Invaders from Rigel (1960)
Alien Planet (1962)

Series

Harold Shea

The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989) with L. Sprague de Camp
* The Compleat Enchanter (1975) with L. Sprague de Camp
** The Incomplete Enchanter (1940) with L. Sprague de Camp
** Castle of Iron (1941) with L. Sprague de Camp
* The Wall of Serpents (1960) with L. Sprague de Camp

Collections

Double in Space (1951)
Double Jeopardy (1952)
Tales From Gavagan's Bar (1953) with L. Sprague de Camp
Tales from Gavagan's Bar (Expanded Edition) (1978) with L. Sprague de Camp

Anthologies

World of Wonder (1951)

Twayne Triplet

1 The Petrified Planet (1952)
2 Witches Three (1952)

Nonfiction

Fletcher Pratt's Naval War Game (1940)
A Man and His Meals (1947)
World of Wonder : an Introduction to Imaginative Literature (1951)

Science

All About Famous Inventors and Their Inventions (1955)
All About Rockets and Jets (1955)
Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Spaceships (1951) with Jack Coggins
By Space Ship to the Moon (1952) with Jack Coggins
Rockets, Satellites and Space Travel (1958) with Jack Coggins

History and Biography

Naval History

The Compact History of the United States Navy (1957)
Empire and the Sea (1946) with Inga Stephens
Fighting Ships of the U.S. Navy (1941) with Jack Coggins
Fleet Against Japan (1946)
The Navy has Wings; the United States Naval Avaition (1943)
The Navy, a History; the Story of a Service in Action (1938)
The Navy's War (1944)
Preble's Boys; Commodore Preble and the Birth of American Sea Power (1950)
Sea Power and Today's War (1939)
Ships, Men - and Bases (1941) with Frank Knox
A Short History of the Army and Navy (1944)

The Napoleonic Wars

The Empire and the Glory; Napoleon Bonaparte: 1800-1806 (1948)
The Heroic Years; Fourteen Years of the Republic, 1801-1815 (1934)
Road to Empire; the Life and Times of Bonaparte, the General (1939)

The Civil War

The Civil War (1955)
Civil War in Pictures (1955)
Civil War on Western Waters (1956)
The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln : an Essay (1951) with Colin R. Ballard
The Monitor and the Merrimac (1951)
Ordeal by Fire; an Informal History of the Civil War (1935)
Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War (1953)

World War II

America and Total War (1941)
The Marines' War, an Account of the Struggle for the Pacific from Both American and Japanese Sources (1948)
The U.S. Army : a Guide to its Men and Equipment (1942) with David Pattee
War for the World; a Chronicle of Our Fighting Forces in World War II (1950)
What the Citizen Should Know about Modern War (1942)

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