Early life, family and education Sleator, the oldest of four siblings, was born in
Havre de Grace,
Maryland, to William Warner Sleator Jr., a professor of physiology and
biophysics, and Esther Kaplan Sleator, a pediatrician who did pioneering research on
attention deficit disorder (ADD). The Sleator family moved to
University City,
Missouri, a suburb of
St. Louis, when Billy (as the family called him) was three. His younger siblings are Vicky Wald, Tycho (Associate Professor of
Physics at
NYU), and
Daniel (Professor of
Computer Science at
CMU). He attended
University City High School, where he was known as a composer who wrote scores for school plays His first published book was a children's story called
The Angry Moon, released in 1970. It won a
Caldecott Honor citation. Sleator's writing style has been described as clean and simple. His characters are reluctant teenage heroes, and Sleator's younger siblings and friends have often found themselves being written into his prose, Unlike the 'Golden Age' science fiction future-oriented model (one of
Buck Rogers tomorrowlands), Sleator's work often includes a morbid or negative fixation on the past or includes visions of dystopian or alternate worlds (future or otherwise) in which something has gone wrong. For example, Sleator's
The Green Futures of Tycho takes place in the past in addition to the future; the world outside his
House of Stairs is hinted to be dystopic;
Interstellar Pig draws upon the supposed insanity of a long-dead prisoner. Elements of
Thai culture also occasionally turn up in his stories. His 2009 short story "Fingernail" appears in the
anthology How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity and is from a young gay Thai man's perspective.
Personal life Sleator struggled with alcoholism. He split his time between homes in
Boston,
Massachusetts, and a small village in rural
Thailand. His partner Paul Peter Rhode died in 1999, and his companion Siang Chitsa-Ard died in 2008. Sleator himself died on August 3, 2011, in Bua Chet, Thailand. == Works ==