William Sleator

Sleator, the oldest of four siblings, was born in Havre de Grace, Maryland, to William Warner Sleator, Jr., a professor of physiology and biophysics, and Esther Kaplan Sleator, a pediatrician who did pioneering research on attention deficit disorder (ADD).[1] The Sleator family moved to University City, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, when Billy (as the family called him) was three. His younger siblings are Vicky Wald, Tycho (Associate Professor of Physics at NYU), and Daniel (Professor of Computer Science at CMU). He attended University City High School, where he was known as a composer who wrote scores for school plays[4] and the orchestra. He graduated in 1963.

He graduated from Harvard University[4] with a degree in English[1] in 1967.

After college, Sleator moved to England, earning money by playing music in ballet schools.[1][3] Eventually, Sleator returned to the United States to write his first novel, Blackbriar, eventually published in 1972, which was based on real life experiences.[4] His first published book was a children's story called The Angry Moon, released in 1970. It won a Caldecott Honor citation.[3]

Sleator's writing style has been described as clean and simple. His characters are reluctant teenage heroes, and Sleator's younger siblings and friends have often found themselves being written into his prose,[1] as in the semi-autobiographical story collection Oddballs.[5]

Unlike the 'Golden Age' science fiction future-oriented model (one of Buck Rogers tomorrowlands), Sleator's work often includes a morbid or negative fixation on the past or includes visions of dystopian[3] or alternate worlds (future or otherwise) in which something has gone wrong. For example, Sleator's The Green Futures of Tycho takes place in the past in addition to the future; the world outside his House of Stairs is hinted to be dystopic; Interstellar Pig draws upon the supposed insanity of a long-dead prisoner.

Elements of Thai culture also occasionally turn up in his stories. His 2009 short story "Fingernail" appears in the anthology How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity and is from a young gay Thai man's perspective.

Sleator struggled with alcoholism.[1]

He split his time between homes in Boston, Massachusetts, and a small village in rural Thailand.[5] His companion Siang Chitsa-Ard had died in 2008, and his preceding partner Paul Peter Rhode had died in 1999.[1] He died on August 3, 2011,[2] in Bua Chet, Thailand.[3]