The Incomplete Enchanter

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My late friend and collaborator Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was a connoisseur of heroic fantasy before that term was ever invented. He read Norse sagas in the original and extravagantly admired E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros. Curiously, be despised Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories — next to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings three-decker, the most successful books in the genre — because their occasional crudities and lapses of logic exasperated him. He had no use for heroes who merely battered their way out of traps by their bulging thews, without using their brains.

(Murray) Fletcher Pratt, the son of an upstate New York farmer, was born on the Indian reservation near Buffalo. He claimed that this gave him the right to hunt and fish in New York State without a licence, but he never availed himself of the privilege.

As a youth, five foot three but wiry and muscular, Pratt undertook two careers in Buffalo. One was that of librarian; the other that of prizefighter in the flyweight (112-pound) class. He fought several times, lost a couple of teeth, and knocked one opponent cold. When the story appeared in the Buffalo papers, the head librarian told him that it simply would not do to have one of their employees knocking people arsy-versy. Forced to choose between the two careers, Pratt chose the library.

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