Harlan Ellison

He has used several pseudonyms throughout his writing career, the most popular one being ‘Cordwainer Bird’. Ellison uses this particular pen name when his work has been modified without his approval.

Harlan Ellison has been married five times, and currently resides with his wife ‘Susan Toth’. Two of his marriages ended in divorce. Ellison does not have any children from any of his marriages.

Ellison has been a great advocate of civil rights. In 1965, he participated in the ‘Bloody Sunday March’ from Selma to Montgomery, a protest march supporting the ‘American civil rights movement’, led by ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.’.

Harlan Ellison was born to Serita Ellison, a housewife and Louis Ellison, a dentist-turned-jewelry salesman in Cleveland, Ohio.

Harlan’s family moved to Painesville, Ohio, where he faced severe discrimination for being a Jew and was an outcast. His family returned to Cleveland after his father died.

During his eventful childhood and adolescence, Ellison often ran away from home and took up unusual jobs such as tuna fisherman, travelling crop-picker, bodyguard, truck driver, cook, lithographer, book salesman etc.

He also acted in several plays at the ‘Cleveland Play House’, a local theatre company in Cleveland. Ellison was an avid reader of science-fiction and fantasy and wrote for the Cleveland science-fiction society’s amateur magazine, ‘Science-Fantasy Bulletin’.

In 1949, he got his two stories published in the local newspaper ‘Cleveland News’ and after a few years sold a story to ‘EC Comics’.

In 1955, Ellison moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, particularly in the genre of science-fiction. He published more than 100 articles and short stories in the next couple of years.

Soon after reaching New York, Ellison wanted to write about youth gangs and as a part of his research, joined one such gang incognito in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. The gang was called ‘The Barons’ and Harlan acted as the gang’s war counsellor for 10 weeks.

This experience was used in Ellison’s novel ‘Web of the City/Rumble’, the collection ‘The Deadly Streets’ and ‘Memos from Purgatory’, a part of his memoir.

From 1957 to 1959, Ellison served in the US Army, returning to New York afterwards. During this time, he wrote a lot of erotic stories, such as ‘God Bless the Ugly Virgin’ and ‘Tramp’, which were later reprinted in magazines.

In 1959, he moved to Chicago and worked as the editor of the ‘Rogue Magazine’. Later, he was involved in the formation of ‘Regency Books’, subsequently becoming a book editor. He edited works by prominent authors such as B. Traven, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch and Philip Jos� Farmer etc.

Harlan Ellison has written many of the greatest short stories in the genre of science-fiction. Among his most famous stories are '”Repent, Harlequin!”' Said the Ticktockman’, a satire that celebrates civil disobedience against authority and ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ a post-apocalyptic adventure story.

Ellison edited ‘Dangerous Visions’, the revolutionary collection of science-fiction stories and is praised extensively for encouraging the authors to go against the pre-existing conventions of science-fiction writing.

Harlan Ellison’s screenplay for Star Trek’s episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ is widely regarded as the best episode of all 79 in the series for which he earned wide appreciation.