During 1941-42, Pratt and I wrote two fantasy novels, The Land of Unreason and The Carnelian Cube. Pearl Harbor came just as I was finishing my part of The Carnelian Cube. I volunteered for the Naval Reserve, was commissioned, and spent the war navigating a desk at the Philadelphia Naval Base. I did engineering on naval aircraft along with Heinlein and Asimov.

Pratt, a strong patriot and nationalist, described himself as a political conservative — although, when one discussed actual current issues with him one found in him a surprisingly objective, pragmatic, almost liberal attitude. Kept out of the armed forces by his physical limitations and age, he wrote a war column for the New York Post. This ended when his editor forced him to guess on the outcome of the battle of the Coral Sea, and he guessed wrong. He also wrote a number of books on the war, especially the part played in it by the U.S. Navy.

Then Pratt became a naval war correspondent assigned to Latin America. An old Brazilophile who spoke fluent Portuguese, Pratt visited Brazil. He had long worn a moustache and, in the early 1930s for a while, a goatee. Now he grew a straggly full beard, greying reddish in colour and of Babylonian cut. He hated razors, and the Navy forbade him to use his electric shaver on shipboard in the Caribbean. This was long before the revival of beards in the 1950s and ‘60s. His small size, whiskers, thick, tinted glasses, and loud shirts made an ensemble not easily forgotten.

After the war, Pratt resumed living in New York, while my family and I stayed on in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We continued our collaborations with the two later Harold Shea novellas and the Gavagan’s Bar stories — a series of barroom tall tales, comparable to (though conceived independently of) Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales of the White Hart. Pratt also wrote two first-class heroic-fantasy novels of his own: The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star.