Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York in 1918. His name was legally changed to Theodore Sturgeon at age eleven after his mother’s divorce and remarriage to William Dicky (“Argyll”) Sturgeon.

He sold his first story in 1938 to the McClure Syndicate, which bought much of his early work. At first he wrote mainly short stories, primarily for genre magazines such as Astounding and Unknown, but also for general-interest publications such as Argosy Magazine. He used the pen name “E. Waldo Hunter” when two of his stories ran in the same issue of Astounding. A few of his early stories were signed “Theodore H. Sturgeon.”

In 1951, Sturgeon coined what is now known as Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.” This was originally known as Sturgeon’s Revelation; Sturgeon has said that “Sturgeon’s Law” was originally “Nothing is always absolutely so.” However, the former statement is now widely referred to as Sturgeon’s Law. He is also known for his dedication to a credo of critical thinking that challenged all normative assumptions: “Ask the next question.” He represented this credo by the symbol of a Q with an arrow through it, an example of which he wore around his neck and used as part of his signature in the last 15 years of his life.

Disliking arguments with Campbell over editorial decisions, after 1950 Sturgeon only published one story in Astounding. Sturgeon wrote the screenplays for the Star Trek episodes “Shore Leave” (1966) and “Amok Time” (1967, written up and published as a Bantam Books “Star Trek Fotonovel” in 1978). The latter featured the first appearance of pon farr, the Vulcan mating ritual, the sentence “Live long and prosper” and the Vulcan hand symbol. Sturgeon published the “first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, ‘The World Well Lost’ [June 1953] and ‘Affair With a Green Monkey’ [May 1957]”, and sometimes put gay subtext in his work, such as the back-rub scene in “Shore Leave”, or in his Western story, “Scars”. Sturgeon also wrote several episodes of Star Trek that were never produced. One of these first introduced the Prime Directive. He also wrote an episode of the Saturday morning show Land of the Lost, “The Pylon Express”, in 1975. Two of Sturgeon’s stories were adapted for The New Twilight Zone. One, “A Saucer of Loneliness”, was broadcast in 1986 and was dedicated to his memory. Another short story, “Yesterday was Monday”, was the inspiration for The New Twilight Zone episode “A Matter of Minutes”. His 1944 novella “Killdozer!” was the inspiration for the 1970s made-for-TV movie, Marvel comic book, and alternative rock band of the same name, as well as becoming the colloquial name for Marvin Heemeyer’s 2004 bulldozer rage incident.

Sturgeon’s original novels were all published between 1950 and 1961, and the bulk of his short story work dated from the 1940s and 1950s. Though he continued to write through 1983, his work rate dipped noticeably in the later years of his life; a 1971 story collection entitled Sturgeon Is Alive And Well addressed Sturgeon’s seeming withdrawal from the public eye in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Sturgeon lived for several years in Springfield, Oregon. He died on May 8, 1985, of lung fibrosis, at Sacred Heart General Hospital in the neighboring city of Eugene.