A Boy And His Dog

♦ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ♦

The author was bom Harlan Jay Ellison on May 27,1934, in Cleveland, Ohio. In grade school when his father died, Harlan endured a childhood in poverty, raised by his widowed mother. Young Harlan spent a restless boyhood on the road working at odd jobs. When he became old enough to earn a living, Ellison supported his mother. Ellison has written warmly of his Jewish parents, particularly his mother, and has quoted her Yiddish expressions, which have had a colorful influence upon his writing all his life.

As a young man, Ellison went to Ohio State University from 1953 to 1954, before moving to New York City to work as a writer. To gain background for his first

Love Ain't Nothing But Sex

Misspelled, 1968 A Boy and His Dog, 1969 All the Lies That Are My Life, 1980 Vic and Blood: Chronicles of a Boy and

His Dog, 1989

major novel, dealing with juvenile delinquency, he took an assumed name and ran with a youth gang in Brooklyn's dangerous Red Hook sections for ten weeks. In 1957, he was drafted into the United States Army, training at Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and serving two years at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Camp Brekenridge, Indiana. Since leaving the military, he has been a writer in many genres.

Ellison's writing career has spanned nearly fifty years. His works have been translated into twenty-six languages and have sold millions of copies. He has drawn attention to the art of writing by performing the remarkable feat of writing stories in the windows of bookstores (in Paris, London, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans and elsewhere),

A Boy and His Dog

51

Harlan Ellison

stories that have gone on to win major awards and literary prizes. He has covered and written about civil rights marches, riots, antiwar demonstrations, and other scenes of civil unrest. His two books of essays on television, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, have sold millions of copies and have been used in media classes in more than 200 American universities.

He has won more awards than any other living writer for his over seventy-five books, 1700 stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, two dozen teleplays, and one dozen motion pictures. He has won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Bram Stoker Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Georges Melies fantasy film award, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Writers' Guild of America Award, as well as the Silver Pen for Journalism by PEN, the international writers' union. He was presented with the first Living Legend Award by the

International Horror Critics at the 1995 World Horror Convention.

Perhaps Ellison's summarizes his own life best in the afterword to his book The Essential Ellison, "For a brief time 1 was here; and for a brief time I mattered."

Copyright © 2002 by The Gale Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.