Clarke, Madeleine L'Engle, and Stephen King, among others. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., whom Sturgeon befriended when Vonnegut was a young man, is believed to have modeled his character Kilgore Trout on Sturgeon. A science-fiction writer who has authored hundreds of books filled with wildly inventive concepts, Trout lives in poverty and obscurity because the ridiculous titles he gives his books, and the pornographic magazines in which his stories appear, severely limit his audience. Trout is an homage to Sturgeon for his inventiveness and his ability to confront major themes as well as a satire of the writer's eccentricity. "Some believe that [Kilgore Trout] is based on Theodore Sturgeon, because of the similarity of both their names and their fates," admitted David N. Samuelson and Arthur Hlavaty in the
St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, "but perhaps no SF writer of the time was less like Trout than the eloquent and compassionate Sturgeon. . . . Unselfishly giving and fiscally irresponsible . . . , Sturgeon never profited much financially from his writing. But he turned his suffering into beauty, encapsulating in fiction the longing for alternatives that characterizes many people's fascination with science fiction and fantasy."
Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in 1918 in Staten Island, New York.
