Theodore George Pratt was born on 26 Apr 1901, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Thomas A. and Emma R. Pratt. His father was born in Ontario, Canada and came to the United States in 1892. His mother was born in Minnesota and married his father in 1898. By 1920 Pratt's family was living in New Rochelle, New York, where his father was a sales manager for a local firm.

Pratt attended Colgate and Columbia universities and began his writing career as a newspaper columnist while he also worked as a reader for a movie company. In 1923 one of his first plays, "The Revolt of the Mummies", was performed by the Huguenot Players of New Rochelle. Later Pratt traveled to Europe where he found work as a foreign correspondent for The New York Sun and soon became a contributor to The New Yorker.

In 1933 Pratt wrote an article that appeared in H.L. Mencken's American Mercury that described conditions as he found them on the Spanish island of Majorca. After being deported from Majorca as an undesirable alien, Pratt returned to the US and settled in Florida where he began to write novels.

Though the author many popular books and plays, Pratt is best remembered for his trilogy about the state of Florida; "The Barefoot Mailman" (1943), "The Flame Tree" (1950) and "The Big Bubble" (1951). Once while researching one of his books about state he became lost in the Everglades for a day and a half. While his books chronicled that period in Florida history (1886 to 1927) that saw the it go from a frontier wilderness to an opulent civilization, Pratt felt Florida's apex occurred when the Seminole Indians had it to themselves.

Pratt died on 15 December, 1969, in Delray Beach, Florida, after a heart attack. He was survived by his wife Jackie and a sister.

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Theodore Pratt

Writer