Theodore Pratt: A Florida Writer’s Life

Hagood (Stringbean), a literature professor at Florida Atlantic University, delivers a workmanlike biography of dime-store novelist Theodore Pratt (1901–1969), whose best-known writing was set in and inspired by the state of Florida. A Minnesotan by birth, Pratt moved to New York as a teenager and remained there until 1934 when, reeling from the Great Depression and “suffering in the New York cold,” he relocated with his wife to southeastern Florida. It was there that his fledgling fiction career took off. Pratt’s most famous book, The Barefoot Mailman, was inspired by local tales about mail carriers whose routes required them to walk along beaches. Hagood observes that in addition to Florida, sex was one of Pratt’s most persistent themes, a focus that dovetailed with the rise of cheap paperbacks that aspired to titillate. (Thirty-three publishers rejected Pratt’s novel about what was then called a nymphomaniac before it was picked up by an upstart paperback publisher in the late 1940s.) The immersive prose evokes the “alligator-haunted hammocks and stately sheet flow of the South Florida interior,” though the surfeit of detail will at times try readers’ patience (a breakdown of Pratt’s college report card and meticulous recreation of his honeymoon itinerary feel particularly superfluous). Still, this will satisfy fans of the regional writer. Photos. (Aug.)