5 Quotes & Sayings By Fletcher Pratt

Fletcher Pratt was an American author, historian, and biographer. He was born in 1883 to a wealthy family in New York City. After graduating from Harvard University with an A.B. in 1906, Pratt moved to Washington, D.C., where he became an assistant editor of The Outlook, a magazine founded by his father Read more

Over the next few years he traveled around the world, visiting many countries, including the Soviet Union (1912–14) and China (1914–15) and supporting the revolution there. During World War I he served with the American Expeditionary Force in France and was wounded twice; he spent almost three years in military hospitals at home and abroad. He married Winifred Custer Pratt (1884–1978), daughter of General George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876), soon after returning to America in 1917.

After the war he began work on his first book, The Great Pyramid Imposters. He took up writing full-time in 1932 and wrote more than sixty books, including biographies of Thomas Edison (1931) and Henry Ford (1936) and The Man Nobody Knows: Frank Lloyd Wright (1937). His other works include biographies of Walt Whitman (1929); scientists James Joule, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, William Herschel; poets Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth; ship captains Christopher Columbus, James Cook; inventors Ponce de Leon; authors Charles Dickens, Mark Twain; statesmen George Washington; John Adams; Thomas Jefferson; Benjamin Franklin; William Shakespeare; Napoleon Bonaparte; William Pitt the Younger; Abraham Lincoln; Theodore Roosevelt.

This last book won him a second Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1938. Pratt also wrote two novels—Killing Time (1923), about a chase for a lost treasure of gold coins by pirates off the coast of Florida during the Civil War, and The Gold-Buglers (1934)—and numerous short stories. Pratt's books have been translated into many languages worldwide.

His work has inspired both serious research and popularization among popular historians such as John Toland.

1
A fine young man and a fine young felly he always was, except that in the old days, before you began coming in here, Mr. Witherwax, he maybe had too much money and spent too much of it on girls. Take them alone, either one; the money without the women, or a good girl without the money that can be a help to a young felly, and he's fixed for life. But put them together; and often as not, the young felly goes on the booze. ("The Better Mousetrap") . Fletcher Pratt
2
That's just like the manual says, ' said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.'' You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' ("Gin Comes In Bottles") Fletcher Pratt
3
The more people that meet each other, the better it is for all of them. ("The Gift Of God"). Fletcher Pratt
4
Need 'nether whiskey. Whiskey chaser. Gotta get two men drunk.' Mr. Cohan placed both hands on the bar. 'Mr. Walsh, ' he said severely, 'in Gavagan's we will serve a man a drink to wet his whistle, or even because his old woman has pasted him with a dornick, but a drink to get drunk with I do not sell. Now I'm telling you you've had enough for tonight, and in the morning you'll be thanking me..' ("My Brother's Keeper"). Fletcher Pratt