Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison was an American writer of speculative fiction, screenwriter, and essayist whose pugnacious public persona matched the intensity of his prose. He was born Harlan Jay Ellison on May 27, 1934, in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Louis Laverne Ellison, a dentist and jeweler, and Serita Rosenthal. After his father's death in 1949, the family settled in Cleveland, where he ran away from home repeatedly, working in carnivals and lumber camps before finishing high school.

He attended Ohio State University from 1953 to 1955 but was expelled after a dispute with a creative-writing professor. Moving to New York in 1955, he joined a Brooklyn street gang to research a novel, served two years in the U.S. Army, and edited the magazine Rogue in Chicago before settling in Los Angeles in 1962 to write for television.

His 1967 novella I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream won the Hugo Award and his 1965 short story "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" won both the Hugo and Nebula. As editor he assembled Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), anthologies central to the New Wave of science fiction.

For television he wrote the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" (1967), the original story for The Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand," and many Twilight Zone revivals. He won eight Hugos, four Nebulas, and three Bram Stoker Awards across more than 1,700 published works. He died on June 28, 2018, in Los Angeles, aged 84.

The name Harlan is an English masculine given name derived from an Old English place name meaning "hare land" or "rocky land," carried by him as a writer of fierce, angular fiction.