Peter A. Sturgeon

Who was Peter A. Sturgeon?

Peter Assheton Sturgeon was founder of the American branch of Mensa and the older brother of noted American science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon.

The two brothers were the sons of Edward Molineaux Waldo, a Staten Island paint manufacturer, and Christine Hamilton Dicker, a British writer and political activist. Their parents divorced when they were children and in 1927 their mother married William Dickie Sturgeon, an emigrant Scottish college professor. Christine and her children relocated to Philadelphia where Peter and his brother Ted were educated in public schools.

After high school Peter joined the Communist Party. After working for a time as a party activist in a steel industry organizing campaign in Baltimore, he went to Spain and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer with the British Battalion of the International Brigades. The writer William Tenn has stated that Sturgeon became involved with POUM while in Spain and fell into disfavor with his superiors. After returning to the United States Sturgeon resigned from the Communist Party and associated with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.