Sterling Lord was born in Burlington, Iowa in 1920. He had an interest in tennis from a young age, and in high school became involved in sports journalism, calling in tennis scores to the local newspapers, and writing for his school newspaper. Lord's passion for tennis brought him to Grinnell College in Iowa. After college, he was drafted into the army, where he studied electronics and radar before being transferred to Europe. At the end of WWII, Lord started working for the European edition of "Stars and Stripes", an army publication. There he became the editor for "Weekend", a weekly magazine, which was shortly thereafter shut down by the army. Lord and Richard Evan Jones, the editor in chief, continued printing the magazine as a private enterprise, with offices in Frankfurt and, eventually, in Paris, where Lord met his wife, artist Dodie Yencesse. When "Weekend" folded in the late 1940's, Lord moved to New York City.

During his first two years in New York, Lord worked as an editor for three different magazines. Deciding that that the magazine industry was too unstable, Lord opened up a literary agency with partner Stanley Colbert in 1952. After a couple of years, Colbert left the agency and in 1954 it became the Sterling Lord Agency. During the early years of the agency, Lord mostly managed non-fiction and ghost writers, such as Charlie Samuels, John Keats, Rowland Barker and Al Hirshberg. That was also the period when he met, and started working with, Jack Kerouac. The agency grew quickly as Lord and the authors he published made names for themselves.

In 1987, Sterling Lord Agency merged with the firm Literistic, and has since continued to serve the literary community. Throughout the years, the Sterling Lord Literistic Agency has managed many well known authors such as Terry Southern, David Wise, Jimmy Breslin, Anne Sexton, Erica Jong, the Berenstain family, and many others.