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
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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.