... [L]ately there has come into my weary hands a paperback of short stories by Harlan Ellison, a young writer whose name I had not known before. The book is horribly titled, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, the Gentleman Junkie being one of its least-distinguished stories; on the cover, as is the way, the stories are exploited as raw, vital, uncompromising, startling, "torn from the shadows of a twilight world" — oh, you know how they go on.

But it turns out that Mr. Ellison is a good, honest, clean writer, putting down what he has seen and known, and no sensationalism about it. (Book review by Dorothy Parker, Esquire, January, 1962)

Harlan Ellison was called many things — abrasive, crass, hard-headed, egomaniacal, rude — but no one ever accused him of being quiet, or claimed he was one to hold his tongue. In fact, Ellison was one of those larger-than-life figures whose personality, wit, and passion seemed at times to overshadow his artistry, and that above all else, he was a supremely talented and soulful writer, one who eviscerated the human condition with a bluntness befitting of his temperament.

In researching this post, the scale of Ellison's life at times seemed to me almost too great to summarize in a simple blog post. This was, after all, a man who once almost came to blows with Frank Sinatra, because Sinatra didn't like Ellison's shoes. (Ellison kept the offending shoes wrapped in plastic, in his closet, as a memento of sorts.) Ellison, also, in no short order got in a physical altercation over script notes that resulted in an ABC executive breaking their pelvis; mailed a dead gopher to a publishing house because of a contract dispute; claimed to have slept with over 500 women; and had a persistent rumor following him that he threw a fan down an elevator shaft.

He also, over the course of his 60-year-long career, won five Nebula awards, six Bram Stoker awards, two Edgar Allen Poe awards, and 10 ½ Hugos. (The ½ being on account of Ellison's insistence that he, being the author of the original story that the film A Boy and His Dog was based on, which won Best Dramatic Presentation in 1976, receive some sort of recognition. He was given the base of a Hugo in lieu of a full Hugo.) Additionally, he received the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Grand Master Award and a Silver Pen for Journalism by International Pen. And those aren't all of his awards or honorifics.

He won five Nebula awards, six Bram Stoker awards, two Edgar Allen Poe awards, and 10 ½ Hugos

He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, never drank, never used drugs, mentored many up-and-coming writers, championed those he thought were failed by an unfair industry and culture, fought for, and spoke often about, the need for writers to value their own work, especially when no one else would, and never failed to speak his mind — an admirable, if, at times, divisive quality.

Famed author and personal friend Issac Asimov wrote of Ellison:

I can't speak to Asimov's second point, as I never knew Ellison personally, but the first point certainly seems true. Ellison enjoyed being the smartest, boldest, quickest figure in any room he happened to occupy, even if that was, at times, a detriment to his professional career, or an outright affront to those around him. He seemed to have little respect for his editors, as he proudly displayed, on his Olympia typewriter, a Latin Proverb, "Sat ci sat bene," which translates to, "It is done quickly enough if it is done well." Explaining this quote, Ellison said, "[That's] my response to all editors when they call me. Because they have schedules, and to be perfectly candid, I don't give a shit about their schedules. I work at the pace the work demands I work."

Ellison had an almost unparalleled artistic backbone, if that wasn't obvious by now, and a personal clarity of vision that could make the most stubborn and confident of men shudder. He left a job at the second iteration of The Twilight Zone, a writing gig that paid 4,000 dollars a week, because CBS refused to produce an episode he had written. The episode dealt with themes of racism and bigotry, and CBS was uncomfortable with potentially offending swathes of their audience, as Ellison tells it, explaining: "They said it would offend people. I said who? The racists and bigots? If there weren't any racism or bigotry, we wouldn't have to do a show like this. Well, they didn't do it, and I said, 'That's it. I can't work for you. I can't work for people I can't respect.' [...] I did it, not because I'm such a great, honorable person, but because my gut would not let me stay there."

He left a job at the second iteration of The Twilight Zone, a writing gig that paid 4,000 dollars a week, because CBS refused to produce an episode he had written

Though Ellison was a consultant and writer on various television shows over the course of his career, having written for the original Star Trek series and the Outer Limits, he was a fierce critic of television as a medium. Ellison's Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge of Forever" is often cited as one of series' best episodes, but Ellison was dissatisfied with the broadcast version, as Gene Rodenberry, the show's creator, had Ellison's original script rewritten. Accepting a Hugo for the episode, which won Best Dramatic Presentation, Ellison "dedicated the award to 'the memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration.'" To say the least, Ellison was dissatisfied, and he remained embittered about the process of making television and the junk he thought populated the airways. Ellison's two volumes of television criticism — The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat — collected his columns from the The Los Angeles Free Press, where "Ellison looked at the mass media and saw the most powerful informational weapon in the world being used primarily for the dissemination of mediocrity and meanness, and he pushed back against it with all his considerable talent, wit, and ire."

Though Ellison's combative personality and crotchety demeanor could at times be off-putting to fans and industry insiders, and in some cases were a liability to his career, those aspects of his character seemed to emerge from a genuine belief that writing was a craft to be respected, that the writer's voice and labor held value, even when profit, markets, and a culture sustained on disposability indicated otherwise.

... aspects of his character seemed to emerge from a genuine belief that writing was a craft to be respected

His disdain for the marketization of writing and what he perceived as a cultural downturn toward mediocrity may explain why Ellison "loathed" being called a 'Science Fiction" writer. He explained in a roundtable discussion on Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters his distaste for the moniker:

He further expounded in a 1988 interview with the Sun Sentinel: "'Don't call me a science-fiction writer ... I am a writer, period. Like Faulkner, I write about the heart in conflict with itself. We're talking about my survival here. There's an entire cadre of astounding talents that are nonentities as far as the literary establishment is concerned. I don't ask you to love me, just give me some respect. Don't you think a writer has the right to be given the label he chooses?'" His distaste for his non-chosen descriptor was so great that Ellison once walked off a television interview before his introduction was fully complete — the interviewer had called him a Science Fiction writer.

Even for all his personal idiosyncrasies and bluster, Ellison was, at his core, a writer, and more than that, he was a writer's writer — an often maligned classification thought of as being reserved for those who had influence on the popular. That's not the case with Ellison.

While he no doubt influenced countless authors in the realm of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction, Harlan Ellison was, himself, a towering figure in the literary sphere for over six decades, a status he achieved through his prolific nature. Novels, short stories, anthologies, criticism, comic books, screenplays, teleplays, articles, and essays — if it was a writing medium, odds are Ellison wrote in it at some point. He loved writing as the laborious craft it was, an attitude he brought to bear by writing in book store windows and in front of crowds, which he did because he thought: "...in this country people are so distanced from literature, the way it's taught in schools, that they think that people who write are magicians on a mountaintop somewhere. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's so much illiteracy in this country. So by doing it in public, I show people it's a job ... like being a plumber or an electrician."

... a towering figure in the literary sphere for over six decades

His blue-collar attitude toward writing was no doubt a result of his earliest days working in New York City, when he'd spend all night writing a 3000 word story, sell it for a penny a word to one of the local magazines, and cash the check to buy food. In those early days, plucking away at a typewriter to survive, Ellison learned what he thought it meant to be a writer:

In a 1989 New York Times article, Harlan Ellison's criticism was described as having "the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker with a cultural warehouse for a mind," which I find to be an equally fitting description of the man as well. Ellison's trove of knowledge and love for writing and art was writ large in his Sherman Oak's home, known as the "Lost Aztec Temple of Mars'' or "Ellison Wonderland," where he lived most of his life. Across the various floors, rooms, secret entrances, and hidden chambers, Ellison displayed his vast collection of books, comics, action figures, assorted memorabilia, and yes, his pipes, though it's impossible to say whether they're still there, as Ellison quit smoking in 1991.

Across the various floors, rooms, secret entrances, and hidden chambers, Ellison displayed his vast collection of books, comics, action figures, assorted memorabilia, and yes, his pipes

At last count, according to an FAQ on Ellison's website, Ellison possessed "over 400 pipes." The FAQ continues that "Since [Harlan] no longer smokes, [he] would be happy to sell any of them, but they are quite expensive, some going for $800+. 'I mean, we're not talking Kaywoodies, we're talking the very best ... Son of Denmark, Saseini fantails...'. Harlan also has one of Raymond Chandler's pipes, sent to him by the legate of Chandler's estate. The pipe, banded with a gold band with 'Raymond Chandler' inscribed on it, sits in a pipe holder on Harlan's desk. Harlan always smoked Black Cavendish, or 'toasted cavendish', tobacco."

In the decades leading up to 1991, it's hard to find an interview, or author's photo, or publicity still, that doesn't feature Ellison smoking a pipe. Plenty of ink has been spilled over the symbiotic relationship between smoking and writing, and Ellison, being a student of writing, must have understood that relationship intimately. In videos or photos of him writing, whether at home or in bookshop windows, Ellison is often seen with a pipe clenched between his teeth, hunched over an Olympia typewriter, putting to paper whatever sparked in his imagination — working ceaselessly and with an enthusiasm very few can muster.

In videos or photos of him writing, whether at home or in bookshop windows, Ellison is often seen with a pipe clenched between his teeth

Ellison passed in 2018 at the age of 84, leaving behind an immense catalog of published work. Stories like "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream," '"Repent, Harlequin,' Said The Ticktockman" and "The Death Bird" continue to live in the cultural imagination and have influenced countless creatives over the years. One of Ellison's close friends and collaborators, J. Michael Straczynski, is now the Executor of the Harlan and Susan Ellison Trust, and has made it his mission to follow Harlan and Susan's wishes. Since Ellison's death, Straczynski has made plans to get Ellison's work back in print, to finish The Last Dangerous Visions, the last of a trilogy of anthologies that Ellison had been editing for decades, and to get Ellison Wonderland certified as a cultural landmark and turned into a living museum, where all of Ellison's possessions and letters will be preserved.

I couldn't imagine a better way to pay tribute to Ellison and his life than by preserving his work and the work he loved. Given his larger-than-life persona, it's impossible to give anyone the last word on Ellison's life other than Ellison himself. Here is the poignant introduction he wrote for a reprinting of his first novel, Web of the City, which he worked on and finished while in the army. I find it to be a nice encapsulation of how Ellison viewed his legacy, his work, and his life:

Bibliography

• I, Asimov: A Memoir by Isaac Asimov, Esquire, 1994.
• alt.fan.harlan-ellison FAQ
• "HARLAN ELLISON: DON'T CALL ME A 'SCI-FI WRITER,'" (1988) by Chaucey Mabe, Sun Sentinel
• "Harlan Ellison wrote Star Trek's greatest episode. He hated it.," (2018) by Keith Phipps, Vox.com
• "Harlan Ellison was TV's rejected son — and its harshest, most hopeful critic," (2018) by William Hughes, AV Club