Sterling North

Sterling North House
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Location	409 W. Rollin St., Edgerton, Wisconsin
Coordinates	42°50′14″N 89°4′4″W / 42.83722°N 89.06778°W / 42.83722; -89.06778Coordinates: 42°50′14″N 89°4′4″W / 42.83722°N 89.06778°W / 42.83722; -89.06778
Area	less than one acre
Built	1918
Architect	unknown
Architectural style	Queen Anne
NRHP Reference #	96001579
Added to NRHP	January 9, 1997

Thomas Sterling North (November 4, 1906 – December 21, 1974), who used Sterling North professionally, was an American writer. He is best known for the children's novel Rascal, a bestseller in 1963.

North's maternal grandparents, James Hervey Nelson and Sarah Orelup Nelson, were Wisconsin pioneers. Born in Putnam County, New York, James moved first to near Rochester, New York, then to Menomonee Falls, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee), then pioneered a farm near present-day South Wayne, in southwestern Wisconsin. His daughter, Sarah Elizabeth "Elizabeth" Nelson, was Sterling North's mother. She married David Willard North, also the product of a pioneering local family, whose brother ran the family farm. Sarah died when Sterling was eight years old.

North was born on the second floor of a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Koshkonong, a few miles from Edgerton, Wisconsin, in 1906. Surviving a near-paralyzing struggle with polio in his teens, he grew to young adulthood in the quiet southern Wisconsin village of Edgerton, which North transformed into the "Brailsford Junction" setting of several of his books.

North had three siblings: two sisters, Jessica Nelson North who was an author, poet, and editor; Theo (Theodora), who was the martinet in the family; and a brother, Herschel, who survived World War I.

When Sterling North was 11 (in 1917, which would have been the year of his maternal grandfather's 100th birthday), several of his uncles wrote extended biographies about their parents and their pioneer farm life. One of these uncles was Justus Henry Nelson, an early missionary in the Amazon Basin. This writing effort was at the same time as the setting of Rascal and may have been an early literary inspiration to North.

After attending the University of Chicago (he left without graduating in 1929), North worked as a reporter (eventually literary editor) for the Chicago Daily News, the New York World-Telegram, and the New York Sun, before becoming a full-time freelance writer.