In 1939, my old friend and college roommate, John D. Clark, introduced me to Pratt. A naval buff of long standing myself, I was soon an enthusiastic war gamer and a regular attendant at the Pratts’ evenings, along with such colleagues as Laurence Manning, Malcolm Jameson, Ted Sturgeon, George O. Smith, and L. Ron Hubbard, who had not yet manifested himself as the pontiff of Scientology.

I had been free-lancing for a year and a half, having been fired as an economy measure from an editorial job on a trade journal. I was also in the midst of getting married. With the appearance of John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown, Pratt conceived the idea of a series of novellas, in collaboration with me, about a hero who projects himself into the parallel worlds described in our world in myths and legends. We made our protagonist a brash, self-conceited young psychologist named Harold Shea.

First we sent Harold to the world of Scandinavian myth, in The Roaring Trumpet (Unknown, May 1940). Pratt furnished most of the background for this story, since at that time my knowledge of Norse myth was limited to popular digests and retellings. I had not yet read such splendid sources as the Heimskringla and the Prose Edda.

For the second episode, we transferred Harold to the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in The Mathematics of Magic (August 1940). I was never so enthusiastic about the Faerie Queene as Pratt was, finding it tedious for long stretches. Years later, however, when I took to writing verse, I composed a poem, The Dragon-Kings, using the Spenserian nine-line stanza, which is a most exacting verse form. Having sweated through three such stanzas, I was awed by the feat of Edmuud Spenser, whose Faerie Queene comprises over four thousand.