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Harlan Jay Ellison was born in 1934 and died in 2018. Over the course of his career, he published over 1700 pieces of writing. Born in Ohio, he was a restless kid, running away from home several times before taking on many odd jobs. He attended college for a year and a half before being expelled for hitting a professor who didn’t think much of his writing. His love of science fiction was a staple of his young adult life, as he both wrote stories and published his own fanzines. After serving in the Army for two years, he moved to California in 1962 and began working in Hollywood, writing scripts for many television shows, including an episode of the original Star Trek series called “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which is widely considered to be the best episode of the series.

While he continued to write for television periodically for the rest of his life, his greater fame came from both his prolific output of stories and essays, as well as his personality. Ellison wrote science fiction, horror, essays on television, speculative fiction, memoirs, and dipped his toe into many other genres. He was also self-assured to the point of arrogance, and happy to take verbal shots at people who did not recognize his talent. The anthology he edited in 1967 called Dangerous Visions is regarded by many as changing the way that science fiction was regarded by inviting writers to play with the ideas that had held sway for the previous generation. Science fiction after Dangerous Visions could be messier: more violent, more profane, and more provocative. In his later years, he was a respected elder who could be counted on to comment on whatever was happening, in both the world of books and the world at large. He was one of the first writers with a website in 1995 and embraced the highs of notoriety as well as the growing pains of the early internet, regularly engaging in legal actions against those who put his work online without his permission. 

Ellison was a complicated figure throughout his life, but his body of work stands on its own. He once said that his job as a writer was to go to sleep angry and wake up angry. He wrote anger, he wrote sadness, he wrote tenderness, and he wrote hope. For the second half of the 20th century, he was a towering figure in American science fiction and someone that other writers read and revered.

Next section Historical Context: Cold War Fears

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