It is appropriate also that a writer who deplores the violence of war and who has made the arts of healing and reconciliation a focus for his stories should have been born in the year of armistice. It is no less apropos that a writer who makes the mysteries of personality and the idea of the self central to his work should be in a sense two people himself. His natural father managed a retail paint business and came from a New York family with roots in the New World that antedated the Revolution. His mother was a literary woman of English Canadian descent, a poet and school teacher. He had a brother, Peter, who was a year older. Sturgeon was raised an Episcopalian, but his interest in religion and in what he refers to as the human instinct for worship is to be explained at least partly by his ancestry, which was particularly distinguished by clergymen on both sides of the family, from humble village ministers to the purple splendor of one bishop and one archbishop.
Sturgeon's parents' marriage was not a happy one. They separated in 1923 and were divorced in 1927.
This is a free page. This page contains 193 words. This
biography contains 10,864 words (approx. 36 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Theodore (Hamilton) Sturgeon Access Pass.
