Writing in
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Donald L. Lawler felt that the time and place of Sturgeon's birth was prophetic: an island because "loneliness and alienation are two persistent themes in his writing"; and 1918, the year World War I ended, because "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 the armistice." His father, Edward Waldo, was an oil worker and his mother, Christine Hamilton, worked as a writer and artist. When Sturgeon was five years old, his father left the family; his parents divorced in 1927. Two years later, when his mother married William D. Sturgeon, the young boy was adopted and his name was changed to Theodore Sturgeon. "Even though his mother and stepfather were teachers who made every effort to instill a love of learning in their children," wrote Leroy Gonzalez in the
Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, "Sturgeon took little interest in formal education. He attended Overbrook High School near Philadelphia, where, at the age of twelve, he was introduced to gymnastics.
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