Sterling received a degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York, where she was also born. She joined The Reporter in 1949, writing for the magazine until it folded in 1968, became an author and freelance journalist thereafter. She married her husband Thomas Sterling, a novelist, in 1950, and they went to live in Italy, where they passed their honeymoon. She died of cancer at age 75, in a hospital in Arezzo, Italy.