Sturgeon's "The Perfect Host" was the cover story in the November 1948 Weird TalesAn early version of Sturgeon's first novel, The Dreaming Jewels, was the cover story in the February 1950 issue of Fantastic AdventuresSturgeon's novella The Incubi of Parallel X was the cover story in the September 1951 Planet StoriesSturgeon's novella Granny Won't Knit took the cover of the May 1954 Galaxy Science Fiction, illustrated by Ed Emshwiller
Theodore Sturgeon (/ˈstɜːrdʒən/; born Edward Hamilton Waldo, February 26, 1918 – May 8, 1985) was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 short stories, 11 novels, and several scripts for Star Trek: The Original Series.[1]
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.[3]
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.[4] 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.[5]
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[6] (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.[7] 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.[8] 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]",[9] and sometimes put gay subtext in his work, such as the back-rub scene in "Shore Leave",[10] or in his Western story, "Scars".[11]
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".[12]
According to science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, a friend of Sturgeon's,[13] Sturgeon was bisexual.[14]
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.[15][16]
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.[17])
In 1959, he began to write book reviews for National Review, and continued until 1973.
1960s and '70s: Ellery Queen and TV scripts
Sturgeon ghost-wrote one Ellery Queenmystery 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"[18] 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'."[18]
Though Sturgeon continued to write through 1983, his work rate dipped noticeably in the later years of his life; a 1971 story collection entitled Sturgeon Is Alive and Well... addressed Sturgeon's seeming withdrawal from the public eye in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Two of his stories were adapted for the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone. One, "A Saucer of Loneliness", was broadcast in 1986 and was dedicated to his memory. Another short story, "Yesterday Was Monday", was the inspiration for The Twilight Zone episode "A Matter of Minutes".
However, the former statement is now widely referred to as Sturgeon's Law. He is also known for his dedication to a credo of critical thinking that challenged all normative assumptions: "Ask the next question."[23] This was the subject of an essay published in Cavalier Magazine in June 1967. He represented this credo by the symbol of a Q with an arrow through it, an example of which he wore around his neck and used as part of his signature in the last 15 years of his life.[24]
Personal life
Sturgeon was married three times, had two long-term committed relationships outside of marriage, divorced once, and fathered a total of seven children. His first wife was Dorothe Fillingame (married 1940, divorced 1945) with whom he had two daughters.[citation needed] He was married to singer Mary Mair from 1949 until an annulment in 1951.[citation needed] In 1953, he wed Marion McGahan with whom he had two sons and two daughters.[25] In 1969, he began living with Wina Golden, a journalist, with whom he had a son.[26]
Finally, his last long-term committed relationship was with writer and educator Jayne Englehart Tannehill, with whom he remained until the time of his death. She joined Sturgeon at book signings for his collection "Maturity", and signed as "Jayne Sturgeon". Englehart had her own biological son prior to her partnership with Sturgeon, to whom Sturgeon became like a stepfather.[citation needed]
Relationship with Kurt Vonnegut
In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut devised the name of his fictional science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout as an obscure reference to Sturgeon's name.[27] The two writers had become friends when Sturgeon moved to Truro, Massachusetts in 1957. Vonnegut described Trout as a notably unsuccessful writer, prolifically publishing hackwork only in pulp and pornographic magazines. Since the characterization was unflattering, it was not until after Sturgeon's death that Vonnegut explicitly acknowledged the connection; he stated in a 1987 interview that "Yeah, it said so in his obituary in The New York Times. I was delighted that it said in the middle of it that he was the inspiration for the Kurt Vonnegut character of Kilgore Trout."[28] In 2000, Vonnegut wrote an admiring introduction to Volume VII of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.[29]
I, Libertine (1956): Historical novel created as a for-hire hoax. Credited to "Frederick R. Ewing", written from a premise by Jean Shepherd.
The Player on The Other Side (1963): Mystery novel credited to Ellery Queen and ghost-written with Queen's assistance and supervision.
Short stories
Sturgeon published numerous short story collections during his lifetime, many drawing on his most prolific writing years of the 1940s and 1950s.
Note that some reprints of these titles (especially paperback editions) may cut one or two stories from the line-up. Statistics herein refer to the original editions only.
Collections published during Sturgeon's lifetime
The following table includes sixteen volumes (one of them collecting western stories). These are considered "original" collections of Sturgeon material, in that they compiled previously uncollected stories. However, some volumes did contain a few reprinted stories: this list includes books that collected only previously uncollected material, as well as those volumes that collected mostly new material, but also contained up to three stories (representing no more than half the book) that were previously published in a Sturgeon collection.
"Occam's Scalpel" (August, 1971, with an introduction by Terry Carr)
"Vengeance Is." (1980, Dark Forces anthology edited by Kirby McCauley)
Autobiography
Argyll: A Memoir (pamphlet, Sturgeon Project, 1993), an autobiographical sketch about Sturgeon's relationship with his stepfather. Introduction by his editor Paul Williams. Afterword by Samuel R. Delany. Cover art by Donna Nassar. The memoir, written for his psychotherapist, has many suggestions about his life, starting from his family's move from Staten Island to Philadelphia when his stepfather got a job at Drexel University and Sturgeon and his brother were still in the local public school to their attempts to catch poison ivy to delay the move—"Then we moved to Philadelphia, a little apartment on 34 Street with a sort of sun room, which was Argyll's study and had a single couch which was his and Mother's bed, and a kind of living room with a kitchenette built into one wall, where we slept on the floor on mattresses."— and his father's treatment of a puppy he couldn't discipline—"... he used to whip her with a wire after rubbing her nose in it—so he got rid of her" (p. 14). These go on to include Sturgeon's first gay experiences in his 14th year—"So [20-year-old] Bert blew me practically continuously from Friday evening until dinner time Sunday; we kept score and I came 14 times. Sweet are the uses of respectability. My God! It never occurred to me until this minute that Dr. Taft was probably the one—the only one, as sole mentor, who could possibly have insured Argyll's total ignorance!" (p. 52); and in his long letter to his mother and Argyll, included in the same volume, Sturgeon harshly critiques his first novel, The Dreaming Jewels: "My use of one detested Argyll would have been fine, but one wasn't enough; there had to be two, and as a result the balance of the work was destroyed and its literary worth was lost in vengeful polemic" (p. 62).
^Williams, Paul (1976). "Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller"Archived 2003-09-13 at the Wayback Machine. First published 1997, online. Retrieved 2013-03-26. Quote: "Sturgeon because that was the stepfather's name—he was a professor of modern languages at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia—and Theodore because Edward was the boy's father's name and the mother was still bitter and anyway young Edward had always been known as Teddy." Quote: "To this day, libraries all over the world list 'Theodore Sturgeon' as a pseudonym for 'E. H. Waldo', which is incorrect."
^Sturgeon, Theodore (1993). Argyll; A Memoir, Entwhistle Books. ISBN978-0934558167
^Sturgeon, Theodore (2002). "Foreword by William Tenn". In Williams, Paul (ed.). Bright Segment. North Atlantic Books. pp. xiii. ISBN1556433980.
^Latham, Rob (2009). "Fiction, 1950-1963". In Bould, Mark; Butler, Andrew M.; Roberts, Adam; Vint, Sherryl (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Routledge. pp. 80–89. ISBN9781135228361. Archived from the original on January 5, 2024. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
^Nevala-Lee, Alec (2018), Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, New York: Dey Street Books/HarperCollins, p. 280. "Apart from van Vogt, the writer who took dianetics the most seriously was Sturgeon..."
^Hageman, Andrew (2016). "A generic correspondence: Sturgeon–Roddenberry letters on sf, sex, sales and Star Trek". Science Fiction Film & Television. 9 (3): 473–478. doi:10.3828/sfftv.2016.9.15. S2CID193714832.
^
Engel, Joel (June 1, 1994). Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek. Hyperion. p. 92. ISBN0786860049. Theodore Sturgeon, the most anthologized writer in the English language but one who'd never written for television before Star Trek, received several long letters and memos from Roddenberry.
^
Meehan, Paul (November 1, 1998). Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema. Scarecrow Press. p. 166. ISBN0810835738. Veteran science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, reportedly the most anthologized science fiction writer of all time, wrote the teleplay adaptation of his own short story for the ABC-TV movie Killdozer (1974).
^"Interview with Vonnegut". Archived from the original on January 15, 1998. Retrieved April 4, 2013. "I think it's funny when someone is named after a fish"
^ abKeating, H. R. F. (1989). The Bedside Companion to Crime. New York: Mysterious Press.
^ Sturgeon, Theodore (2000), A Saucer of Loneliness: Volume VII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon; Paul Williams (Editor), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Foreword); North Atlantic Books.
Cited sources
Moskowitz, Samuel (1974) [1965]. "Theodore Sturgeon". Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction. Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press. pp. 229–248. ISBN978-0-88355-129-5. An overview of Sturgeon's work to 1965.
