Theodore Sturgeon: I always keep some Theodore Sturgeon anthologies by my bed; Paul Williams, in this article from 1976 calls him "the best short story writer in America," and not without justification. I read a recent review of a collection of his, I have to find it, that compared him, again not without justification, to Sherwood Anderson. Though to my taste, he's a better writer. No two of his stories are alike, and they all affect you in eliptical ways. Sturgeon's most well-known book is More Than Human, and it's really amazing stuff; I don't know how many times I've read it. From the Williams article, here's some nice background on Sturgeon's family:
Theodore Sturgeon was born February 26th, 1918, on Staten Island in New York City. His name at birth was Edward Hamilton Waldo. "I was born a Waldo," Sturgeon told science fiction scholar David Hartwell in an unpublished 1972 interview, "and had kind of an interesting family. Peter Waldo was a dissident priest in the 12th century who got ahold of the dumb idea that perhaps the Pope at Rome ought to go back to the vows of poverty and obedience, get rid of the Swiss Guards and the jewel-encrusted cross, and put on a monk's habit and go out amongst the people. The Pope took a very dim view of that indeed, and they persecuted the Waldenses all across Europe for 200 years."
"That was the Waldensian Heresy, that you should go back to Apostolic Christianity. Nobody wanted to go and do a thing like that. And they settled in Flanders, and in England, and in 1640 two ships of them decided to go to the New World. They got separated by a storm, and one of them went to Connecticut; there are still Waldos in Connecticut to this day. The other ship went far south, and it wound up in, of all places, Haiti. Well, Haiti in 1640 was already a refuge for runaway slaves; and when they found they had a shipload of dissident priests, they welcomed them with open arms. Waldo became corrupted to Vaudois, which became Voodoo, which is the etymology of the word 'voodoo'... . There's been a whole line of gurus in my family: Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of them."
I had a nice, brief chat with Sturgeon at the 1977 Westercon Science Fiction convention in Santa Rosa, and used to have an autographed copy of one of his collections I got then. That was a great convention, what sort of catalyzed my move from Oregon to San Francisco. Besides Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Bracket, and Poul Anderson were there. They're all dead now; I read all of them as I grew up, and I still read some of them. I met my longtime friend Charley Cockey at that convention, too.
Sturgeon's name, and some of his character, is also the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. Interesting that Kilgore Trout may be more famous than one of the writers (others are probably Philip K. Dick and maybe Philip Jose Farmer) who inspired him. Again, for my money, Sturgeon is a better writer than Vonnegut.
This is one of my favorite Paul Williams pieces, though he's done a lot of work I like quite a lot -- the first two Performing Artist books on Dylan are great. I also just saw him interviewed in the Philip K. Dick documentary. I also just finished reading his new collection from Crawdaddy.
11:49:09 AM 
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