Harlan Jay Ellison was born May 27, 1934, in Cleveland, Ohio, the only son of Louis Laverne and Serita Ellison. They soon moved to Painesville (yes, that’s a real town, and a very good description of the experience) where, being rather short, he battled it out daily with bullies.

Photo: Harlan, age 8, is at the far left of the first row. One of the bullies, almost twice his size, is three to the right, both fresh from another fight. Welcome to Painesville.

As he reached adolescence, he frequently ran away from home. By the age of 20 he had worked as a tuna fisherman off the coast of Galveston, Texas; had picked crops in New Orleans; drove a nitroglycerine truck in North Carolina; had been a short-order cook, a cab driver, a book salesman, and a hired gun for a wealthy neurotic.

He attended Ohio State University for 18 months before being booted out, then headed to New York in 1955 where he sold knives at a kiosk in Times Square to make money while he worked on his writing, and joined a street gang to gather material for his first two books, Memos from Purgatory and Gentleman Junie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation.

Photo: Harlan in his early 20s posing for an author photo to promote his stories about gang life

For all the intervening years, he lived life full-throttle and fearlessly. He battled studios and networks over censorship, walked picket lines, wrote in bookstore windows to demystify the writing process, worked on TV shows and walked right back off them when he wasn’t allowed to tell his stories his way, was praised, pilloried, stuck with the check at every dinner even though the other deadbeats at the table could have picked it up, spoke at conventions before thousands of fans, guested on talk shows, appeared as himself in The Simpsons, looked after his friends, and never compromised on anything that would have diminished his work, even when it would have made his life considerably simpler.

Harlan working on The New Twilight Zone shortly before resigning over censorship.

Heeding the call of his heart, he continued writing ferociously. In just two years he published over 100 stories and articles in major and minor publications, in and out of the fantasy/speculative fiction genre, and quickly began receiving recognition for his work from critics, fans, and such luminaries as Dorothy Parker.

In 1957 he was drafted and sent to Army Ranger Training at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he continued to write at night when everyone else was asleep. Fiercely independent and resistant to authority, Harlan and the Army had a mutual parting of the ways in 1959 that registered 5.3 on the Richter Scale, and the crater can still be seen from space.

Photo: Harlan during his early TV writing years.

At 25, after publishing four collections of his short fiction (including The Juvies, A Touch of Infinity, and Ellison Wonderland,) Harlan took off for the West Coast and quickly established a career in television. Over the next few years he wrote for such series as The Outer Limits, Route 66, Burke’s Law, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man from UNCLE, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and the original Star Trek, writing an episode TV Guide selected as the best episode ever produced of that series, The City on the Edge of Forever.

Photo: Harlan on location for production of his script for Cimarron Strip

By 1965 his TV career was so hot that he was asked to write a major studio movie, The Oscar, that came out in 1966. Harlan said on many occasions that the film was so bad that by every imaginable criterion, so wretched, so poorly cast, directed and produced that it killed his movie career overnight. Seriously. Go watch it, you’ll see.

Go with God.

During his early TV years Harlan fell prey to the God of Poor Fashion Choices for Hollywood Celebrities, and condemned all photos from that period to the trash. Or so he thought. He missed this one, which we found in a box in the bedroom closet. Posting them here just to posthumously piss him off.

But 1966 was also the year Harlan won his first Hugo Award, for “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman.” Over the course of his career, he would win (among many others) a total of 11 Hugos, 6 Bram Stoker Awards, 5 Nebula Awards, and four awards from the Writers Guild of America, the first member to hit that number, beating even Rod Serling.

Over the next clutch of years, Harlan published Dangerous Visions, a collection of cutting-edge stories by well known and new writers that completely redefined the genre of speculative fiction. This was followed up by Again, Dangerous Visions, along with more collections of Harlan’s short stories, including: Paingod and Other Delusions, I Have No mouth and I Must Scream, From the Land of Fear, Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Over the Edge, Approaching Oblivion, Deathbird Stories, Strange Wine, Shatterday and Stalking the Nightmare.