Sturgeon, Theodore

Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo on February 26, 1918 in Staten Island, New York. After his parents' divorced, his mother married Scot William Dicky ("Argylle") Sturgeon, and at the age of eleven, Edward took his step-father's last name and changed his first name to Theodore to better match his childhood nickname of "Teddy."

Sturgeon sold his first story in 1938 to newspaper McClure's Syndicate. He sold his first Science Fiction story, "Ether Breather," to Astounding Science Fiction a year later. Sturgeon primarily published short stories in genre magazines, but did publish some general-interest stories as well. He published The Dreaming Jewels, his first novel, in 1950. Sturgeon continued to publish short stories, book reviews, and novels, establishing his work as an innovative in the Science Fiction genre. He was known to use a technique known as "rhythmic prose," in which his prose text would drop into a standard poetic meter. This has the effect of creating a subtle shift in mood, usually without alerting the reader to its cause.

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