Papers of John Clark Pratt

John Clark Pratt was professor (1980-2002) and department head (1974-1980) of English at Colorado State University. He is considered the leading scholar on the subject of literature and the Vietnam War.

John Clark Pratt was born on August 19, 1932 in St. Albans, Vermont and grew up in Darien, Connecticut. His father, John Lowell Pratt was president of the A.B. Barnes and Company, a publisher in New York. John Clark Pratt attended the Eaglebrook School, Phillips Academy, Dartmouth University, and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley during his senior year of college, graduating in 1954 with a degree in English.

Pratt married his first wife in 1955 and they had four children, three daughters and one son. After his divorce in 1966 he met his second wife, who had two daughters. His second wife died in 2001.

After graduation, Pratt joined the Aviation Cadet Program and was commissioned as a second lieutenant and a jet fighter pilot instructor. He was assigned to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO from 1960 to 1974 as both a jet pilot instructor and as part of the faculty of the department of English. In 1962 Pratt published his first book, The Meaning of Modern Poetry.

Pratt earned his M.A. from Columbia in 1962 and his doctorate in English literature from Princeton in 1965. Pratt served in the Vietnam War as a pilot and operations analyst in 1969-1970 in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and flew combat missions in Laos. In 1974, he retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel and also published a novel, The Laotian Fragments. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Portugal in 1974-1975, witnessing events that gave rise to his novel American Affairs. An additional Fulbright Fellowship to the Soviet Union was awarded in 1980.

From 1974 to 1980, he chaired the English Department at Colorado State University and served as a professor of English from 1980 to 2002. He has published or edited 18 books and numerous essays, short fiction and poems.

Pratt is the considered the leading scholar in the literature of the Vietnam War and was instrumental in creating the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Morgan Library, a unique and world-renowned collection. He also created the first on-demand publishing company in the country via the Internet. Pratt died on January 2, 2017.