He was the son of journalist and abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton a descendant of Thomas Stanton and reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He graduated from Cornell in 1876. In 1880, he was the Berlin correspondent of the New York Tribune, and he afterward engaged in journalism in Paris, France.

He contributed to periodicals. Major works are:

• François J. Le Goff, Life of Thiers, translator and editor (New York, 1879)
• The Woman Question in Europe (1884)
• A manual of American literature (1909)
• Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (1910)
• "A Soldier of France to His Mother: Letters from the Trenches on the Western Front," Translator and Editor (1917)^[1]

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Stanton, Henry Brewster" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.

• Works by or about Theodore Stanton at Internet Archive