Biography
Howard Overing Sturgis was born in Britain on 30 January 1855, in London. He was born into an affluent New England American family - his father, Russell Sturgis, being the head of Baring's Bank. He had a brother, Julian, who also became a novelist. His parents sent him to be educated at Eton College. He went on to study at the University of Cambridge.
He became a friend of the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton.
After the death of his mother in 1888 he moved with his lover, William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park.
Sturgis's first novel, Tim: A Story of School Life (1891), was published anonymously and was dedicated to the "love that surpasses the love of women." It describes the love of two youths at boarding-school. It was followed in 1895 by All that was possible, an epistolary novel about a retired actress. Sturgis's first two novels were successful as far as sales were concerned; but his third, Belchamber (1904), failed to gain the same plaudits. Although Edith Wharton praised it, Henry James found it unsatisfactory, and afterwards Sturgis went on to publish only one short story (1908), about a lesser writer driven suicidal by the criticism of a greater, and a memorial on his friend, Anne Thackeray.
He died on 7 February 1920. After his death appreciations of him were published by A. C. Benson (1924), Edith Wharton (1934), E. M. Forster (1936) and George Santayana (1944).
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