Youth and education Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in
Staten Island, New York, in 1918. His name was legally changed to Theodore Sturgeon at age eleven after his mother's divorce and subsequent marriage to William Dicky ("Argyll") Sturgeon. Theodore's birth father, Edward Waldo, was a color and dye manufacturer of middling success. With his second wife, Anne, he had one daughter, Joan. Theodore's mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker (Waldo) Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry, and fiction under the name Felix Sturgeon. His stepfather, William Dickie Sturgeon (sometimes known as Argyll), was a mathematics teacher at a prep school and then Romance Languages Professor at Drexel Institute (later
Drexel Institute of Technology) in Philadelphia. Sturgeon's account of his stepfather is included in a posthumous memoir. Sturgeon's sibling,
Peter Sturgeon, wrote technical material for the pharmaceutical industry and the
WHO, and founded the American branch of
Mensa. Upon graduating from high school in 1935, Sturgeon pleaded to be allowed to attend college, but his step-father refused to support him, citing his frivolity.
Great Depression and the war years The young Sturgeon held a wide variety of jobs. As an adolescent, he wanted to be a circus
acrobat; an episode of
rheumatic fever prevented him from pursuing this. From 1935 (aged 17) to 1938, he was a sailor in the
merchant marine, and elements of that experience found their way into several stories. He sold
refrigerators door to door. He managed a hotel in
Jamaica around 1940–1941, worked in several construction and infrastructure jobs (driving a bulldozer in
Puerto Rico, operating a
filling station and truck lubrication center, work at a
drydock) for the US Army in the early war years, and by 1944 was an advertising copywriter. In addition to freelance fiction and television writing, in New York City he opened his own literary agency (which was eventually transferred to
Scott Meredith), worked for
Fortune magazine and other Time Inc. properties on circulation, and edited various publications. Sturgeon initially had a somewhat irregular output, frequently suffering from
writer's block. He sold his first story, "Heavy Insurance", in 1938 to the
McClure Syndicate, which bought much of his early work. It appeared in the
Milwaukee Journal on July 16th. At first, he wrote mainly short stories, primarily for genre magazines such as
Astounding and
Unknown, but also for general-interest publications such as
Argosy Magazine. He used the
pen name "E. Waldo Hunter" when two of his stories ran in the same issue of
Astounding. A few of his early stories were signed "Theodore H. Sturgeon".
1950s: The boom years Although the bulk of Sturgeon's short story work dated from the 1940s and '50s, his original novels were all published between 1950 and 1961. Disliking arguments with
John W. Campbell over editorial decisions, Sturgeon only published one story in
Astounding after 1950. He did, however, take very seriously Campbell's enthusiasms for
psionics and for
L. Ron Hubbard's
Dianetics (even before it became the
Church of Scientology in 1953). Sturgeon was
"audited" by Campbell himself, and according to
Alec Nevala-Lee, he became more devoted to it than any other science fiction writer other than
A.E. van Vogt. He became a trained auditor and defended the Church for decades. Sturgeon published the "first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, '
The World Well Lost' [June 1953] and 'Affair with a Green Monkey' [May 1957]", and sometimes put gay
subtext in his work, such as the back-rub scene in "
Shore Leave", or in his Western story, "Scars".
Carl Sagan later described "To Here and the Easel" (1954) as "a stunning portrait of personality disassociation as perceived from the inside", and further said that many of Sturgeon's works were among the "rare few science‐fiction novels [that] combine a standard science‐fiction theme with a deep human sensitivity". According to science fiction writer
Samuel R. Delany, a friend of Sturgeon's, Sturgeon was bisexual. Though not as well known to the general public as contemporaries like
Isaac Asimov or
Ray Bradbury, Sturgeon became well known among readers of mid-20th-century science fiction anthologies. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s he was the most anthologized English-language author alive. Three Sturgeon stories were adapted for the 1950s NBC radio anthology
X Minus One: "
A Saucer of Loneliness" (broadcast twice), "The Stars Are the Styx" and "Mr. Costello, Hero". Sturgeon was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the
Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of
Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the
Black Widowers. In 1959, Sturgeon moved to
Truro, Massachusetts where he met and became friendly with a then unknown
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Sturgeon was the inspiration for the recurrent character of
Kilgore Trout in Vonnegut's novels.) In 1959, he began to write book reviews (primarily of science fiction at the somewhat improbable behest of
Frank Meyer, with whom he cultivated a largely apolitical friendship centered around their shared love of the genre despite Sturgeon's trenchant countercultural elan) for
National Review, continuing in this capacity until 1973.
1960s and '70s: Ellery Queen and TV scripts Sturgeon
ghost-wrote one
Ellery Queen mystery novel,
The Player on the Other Side (Random House, 1963). This novel was praised by critic
H. R. F. Keating: "[I] had almost finished writing
Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, in which I had included
The Player on the Other Side ... placing the book squarely in the Queen canon" when he learned that it had been written by Sturgeon. Similarly, William DeAndrea, author and winner of
Mystery Writers of America awards, selecting his ten favorite mystery novels for the magazine
Armchair Detective, picked
The Player on the Other Side as one of them. He said: "This book changed my life ... and made a raving mystery fan (and therefore ultimately a mystery writer) out of me. ... The book must be 'one of the most skillful pastiches in the history of literature. An amazing piece of work, whomever did it'." He died on May 8, 1985, of
lung fibrosis, at
Sacred Heart General Hospital in the neighboring city of
Eugene. He had been a lifelong
pipe smoker and his death from lung fibrosis may have been caused by exposure to
asbestos during his Merchant Marine years.
John Clute wrote in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "His influence upon writers like
Harlan Ellison and
Samuel R. Delany was seminal, and in his life and work he was a powerful and generally liberating influence in post-WWII US sf". He won comparatively few genre awards; one was the
World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement from the 1985 World Fantasy Convention. ==Sturgeon's Law==