“Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came ou...”
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Author detail
Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York. He changed his name in 1929, choosing Sturgeon to match his mother's surname after her second marriage, and "Theodore" to match his nickname, "Teddy." His mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Felix Sturgeon. As an adolescent, Sturgeon wanted to be a circus acrobat, but then had an episode of rheumatic fever. From 1935 to 1938, he was a sailor in the merchant marine. He sold his first story in 1938, and his first science fiction story, "Ether Breather" was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939. A few of his early pulp stories were published under the pseudonym "E. Waldo Hunter." He married his first wife, Dorothe Fillingame, in 1940. That year, they moved to the West Indies, where Sturgeon managed a hotel for about a year. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and in 1944 he returned to the U.S. and worked as an advertising copywriter. He divorced in 1945, and married singer Mary Mair in 1949 until an annulment in 1951. In 1950, he published his first novel, The Dreaming Jewels. In 1951, he married Marion McGahan and they had a son in 1952, a daughters in 1954, a daughter in 1956, and a son in 1960. In 1963, he ghost-wrote the Ellery Queen mystery novel The Player on the Other Side, which received critical praise. He wrote two screenplays for the television show Star Trek in 1966 and 1967, and one screenplay for the show Land of the Lost in 1975, and two of his stories were adapted for The New Twilight Zone. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s he was the most anthologized author alive. His last long-term committed relationship was with writer and educator Jayne Engelhart Tannehill, with whom he remained until the time of his death. He died in May of 1985 of lung fibrosis, in Eugene, Oregon.
Quotes
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“Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came ou...”
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“I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer.”
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“I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.”
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“Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and econo...”
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“The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.”
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“When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.”
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“As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He co...”
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“I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody ha...”
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“Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
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“Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.”
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“I have lived most of my life with the conviction that I don't dream, because I never could retrieve a dream.”
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“My wife is beginning to instruct me on means to retrieve dreams, and bit by bit, it does seem to be working.”
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“It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.”
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“You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have t...”
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“The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.”
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“I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.”
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“I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on...”
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