A writer is a person who produces literary content, including but not limited to stories, poetry, music and other literary art, advertising, procedures, and books.
The word is almost synonymous with author. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images, whether fiction or non-fiction. A writer may compose in many different forms including (but certainly not limited to) poetry, prose, or music. Accordingly, a writer in specialist mode may rank as a poet, novelist, copywriter, composer, lyricist, playwright, mythographer, journalist, screenwriter for film or television, etc. (See also: creative writing, technical writing and academic papers.)
Writers' output frequently contributes to the cultural content of a society, and that society may value its writerly – or literature – as an art much like the visual arts (see: painting, sculpture, photography), music, craft and performance art (see: drama, theatre, opera, musical).
In Colonial England, a "Writer" was the lowest grade in the civil services abroad. With respect to society, little has changed in this regard. The East India Company requirements for a "Writer" was a basic knowledge of accounts and youth. Applicants had to sign a bond and obtain a nomination. In the British Royal Navy, writer is the trade designation for an administrative clerk.
Regardless of whether writers are devoted to the craft, they are expected to be able to write well both offline as well as online, or at least recognize the difference between the two. When writing for the Web, it is the content that matters. Writing for the Web is very different from writing for print. Print today remains superior to the Web when it comes to visible space, image and type quality, and speed. Web visitors are quickly scrolling through sites seeking specific information and will not always take the time to read every word. Traditional writing techniques and standards are less of a priority, as multiple headings, bullets and lists are needed to aid scanning readers. With the increase of tech people working as a website content writer, the rules of grammar are respected.
Writers not writing for a living often find enjoyment and small payouts from Web sites seeking material to raise their sites higher in the search engine rankings. This lack of professionalism distorts the line between qualified and amateur writers. Writing standards are often not the highest priority as Web sites seek to drive traffic to gain advertising exposure.
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| Name | Ellie Goulding |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Elena Jane Goulding (born 30 December 1986), better known as Ellie Goulding, is a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. She rose to fame after topping the BBC Sound of 2010 poll and winning the Critics' Choice award at the 2010 BRIT Awards. After signing to Polydor Records in 2009, Goulding released her first extended play An Introduction to Ellie Goulding, followed by her debut full-length studio album, Lights, in 2010. Later that year Goulding recorded a re-release of Lights entitled Bright Lights. Goulding is currently working on her second album. As of January 2011, Goulding has been nominated for two 2011 BRIT Awards for British Female Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Artist. |
| Rowspan | "10"|2010 |
| Rowspan | "9"|Ellie Goulding |
| Rowspan | "2"|2010 Q Awards |
| Rowspan | "2"|2010 Virgin Media Music Awards |
| Rowspan | "2"|2011 |
| Rowspan | "2"|2011 BRIT Awards |
| Rowspan | "2"|Ellie Goulding |
| Name | Goulding, Ellie |
| Alternative names | Elena Jane Goulding |
| Short description | British singer |
| Date of birth | 30 December 1986 |
| Place of birth | Hereford, England |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
In 1959, he published the first edition of Wildlife in America, a history of the extinction and endangerment of various animal and bird species at the hands of the human settlements that occurred throughout North American history, as well as historical efforts at endangered species protection. It was one of the first books to call attention to global warming, by mentioning how the polar ice cap formations caused the lowering of the seas, and how the isthmus that Mongoloid people crossed from Asia to present-day Alaska to establish North America's first settlement is now submerged by the Bering Strait.
In 1965, Matthiessen wrote a novel about a group of American missionaries and a South American tribe. The book was later made into a major Hollywood film with the same title, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in 1991. In 1979, Matthiessen's nonfiction book The Snow Leopard won the Contemporary Thought category of the National Book Award. His work on oceanographic research, "Blue Meridian," with photographer Peter A. Lake, documented the making of the film "Blue Water, White Death," which was directed by Peter Gimbel and Jim Lipscomb. This is widely considered to have inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws in 1974. Matthiessen has been the official State Author of New York, 1995-1997.
In 2008, Matthiessen revisited his trilogy of novels -- Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone, based on accounts of Florida planter Edgar J. Watson's death shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910. He revised and edited the three books, which originated as one 1,500-page manuscript, and the result was a single volume entitled Shadow Country. The book won the 2008 National Book Award.
Matthiessen and Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga.
In 1980, Matthiessen married Tanzanian-born Maria Eckhart in a Zen ceremony on Long Island, New York. They live in Sagaponack, New York.
In 2005, Matthiessen along with Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in Mark Tredinnick's The Land's Wild Music in which Tredinnick analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Matthiessen's writing.
Category:American nature writers Category:American novelists Category:American tax resisters Category:American travel writers Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Modern Buddhist writers Category:John Burroughs Medal recipients Category:White Plum Asanga Category:Zen Buddhist monks and priests Category:1927 births Category:Living people Category:American Zen Buddhists Category:National Book Award winners Category:Yale University alumni Category:The Paris Review
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| Name | Just Jack |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Jack Allsopp |
| Born | May 12, 1975 |
| Origin | Camden Town, London, UK |
| Genre | Dance pop, hip hop, garage |
| Years active | 2002–present |
| Label | RGR Records (2002-2003) Mercury (2006–present) |
| Url | JustJack.co.uk |
After completing a degree in Furniture Design at Kingston University, he enrolled in a community music production course, so that he could better his awareness of sampling and its potential for use. He went on to practice on perfecting his sound by night and to take on a series of jobs by day.
He did not gain fame until 2007, following his TV debut on BBC2's Later... with Jools Holland, and then on the Channel 4 show The Friday Night Project, where he performed the single "Starz In Their Eyes", which reached No.2 in the UK Singles Chart; the following three singles didn't make the top thirty. "Starz In Their Eyes" was also featured in the Dolce & Gabbana Summer 2008 fashion show. Kylie Minogue also did a collaboration with him, "I Talk Too Much", for the American release of his Overtones album.
He performed at Glastonbury Festival, V Festival and T4 on the Beach in 2007 and again at Glastonbury Festival in 2009. Performed at Guilfest in 2010.
"Starz In Their Eyes" is also featured on the Xbox 360 Kinect game Kinect Sports.
He was set to release his third album, titled All Night Cinema, on 31 August 2009, preceded by first single "Embers", which had its premiere on BBC Radio 1 on 12 January 2009 and second single "The Day I Died", which became Jack's second highest charting single on the UK Singles Chart. "The Day I Died" was also used in "". Both singles peaked inside the top 20. The original choice for second single was "Doctor Doctor" but the single release was subsequently postponed.
He will perform at the "Nuit de l'ESSEC" on January 29, 2011.
Category:English dance musicians Category:English male singers Category:English pop singers Category:English electronic musicians Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:People from London
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| Name | John Irving |
|---|---|
| Caption | Irving in Cologne, Germany, 14-09-2010 |
| Birthname | John Wallace Blunt, Jr. |
| Birthdate | March 02, 1942 |
| Birthplace | Exeter, New Hampshire |
| Occupation | novelist, screenwriter |
| Awards | Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay |
| Notableworks | The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany |
| Influences | Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Günter Grass, Thomas Hardy, Robertson Davies, Kurt Vonnegut |
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers and many have been made into movies. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire where Irving grew up as the son of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). (Both Irving and Bissell, and other members of the Exeter community, appear somewhat disguised in many of his novels.)
Irving was in the Exeter wrestling program both as a wrestler and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories and life.
He won the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for 1999 for his script of The Cider House Rules.
Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from his first publisher, Random House, Irving offered his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), to Dutton, which promised him stronger commitment to marketing. The novel became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon, and was a finalist for the American Book Award (now the National Book Award) for hardcover fiction in 1979 (the award went to Tim O'Brien for Going After Cacciato). Garp won the National Book Foundation's award for paperback fiction the following year. Garp was later made into a film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.
Though it is not a widely known fact, The World According to Garp was, along with "Continental Drift" by Russell Banks, considered a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, which was awarded to The Stories of John Cheever.
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The first was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. Like Garp, the novel was quickly made into a film, this time directed by Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. "Interior Space," a short story published in "Fiction" magazine in 1980, was given an O. Henry Award and collected in one of the epnonymous anthologies in 1981.
In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Irving's next novel was A Prayer for Owen Meany, another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school. The novel was influenced by The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the works of Dickens. In Owen Meany, Irving for the first time examined the consequences of the Vietnam War—particularly mandatory conscription, which Irving avoided because he was a married father when of age for the draft. Owen Meany became Irving's best selling book since Garp, and is now a frequent feature on high school English reading lists.
Irving returned to Random House for his next book, A Son of the Circus (1995). Arguably his most complicated and difficult book, and a departure from many of the themes and location settings in his previous novels, it was dismissed by critics but became a national bestseller on the strength of Irving's reputation for fashioning literate, engrossing page-turners. Irving returned in 1998 with A Widow for One Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.
Irving has had four novels reach number one on the bestseller list of The New York Times: The Hotel New Hampshire (September 27, 1981), which stayed number one for seven weeks, and was in the top 15 for over 27 weeks, The Cider House Rules (June 16, 1985), A Widow for One Year (June 14, 1998), and The Fourth Hand (July 29, 2001).
In 1999, after nearly ten years in development, Irving's screenplay for The Cider House Rules was made into a film directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Delroy Lindo. Irving also has a cameo appearance as the disapproving stationmaster. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Soon after, Irving wrote My Movie Business, a memoir about his involvement in creating the film version of The Cider House Rules. After its publication, Irving appeared on the CBC Television program Hot Type to promote the book. During the interview, Irving criticized bestselling American author Tom Wolfe, saying Wolfe “can’t write,” and that his writing makes Irving gag. Wolfe appeared on Hot Type later that year, calling Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike his “three stooges” who were panicked by his newest novel, A Man in Full.
When The Fourth Hand was published in 2001 it became a bestseller. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, a children's story originally included in A Widow for One Year, was published as a book with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann in 2004. Irving's novel, Until I Find You, was released on July 12, 2005.
On June 28, 2005, The New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he has never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.
In his most recent novel, Last Night in Twisted River, published in 2009, Irving's central character is a novelist with "a career that teasingly follows Irving's own," as one journalist put it) In addition to his novels, he has also published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a collection of his writings including a brief memoir and unpublished short fiction, My Movie Business, an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen, and The Imaginary Girlfriend, a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling. In 2010, Irving revealed that he and Tod "Kip" Williams, director and writer of The Door in the Floor, are co-writing a screenplay for an adaptation of The Fourth Hand.
In a New York Magazine interview in 2009, Irving stated that he has begun work on a new novel, which will be his thirteenth. It is based, in part, on a speech from a play by Shakespeare, "Richard II." The novel is titled, "In One Person." In Fall 2010, in "The Vermont Quarterly," "The Daily Free Press," "The Republican" and "The Harvard Crimson," transcripts of Irving's Q&As; while making appearances at several New England colleges revealed the following: "In One Person" will have a first-person view point, Irving's first such narrative since A Prayer For Owen Meany (Irving decided to change the first-person narrative of Until I Find You to third person less than a year before publication); "In One Person" will feature a 60 year-old, bisexual protagonist named William, looking back on his life in the 1950s and '60s; William falls in love with a transgender, a female librarian, and spends time studying in Vienna, where he falls in love with an American girl trying to become a professional opera singer. The novel will share a similar theme (and concern) with The World According to Garp, which was, in part, says Irving, about, "People who hate you for your sexual differences."
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;font-size:90%;" |- valign="bottom" ! Title !! New England !! Prostitutes !! Wrestling !! Vienna !! Bears !! Deadly accident !! Absent Parent !! Film-making / Screen Writing !! Writers !! Sexual variations |- | Setting Free the Bears || || || || || || || || || || |- | The Water-Method Man || || || || || || || || || || adultery |- | The 158-Pound Marriage || || || || || || || || || || swinging, ménage à trois, adultery |- | The World According to Garp || || || || || || || || || || asexualism, rape, pedophilia, transsexualism, swinging, adultery |- | The Hotel New Hampshire || || || || || || || || || || rape, gang rape, older woman/younger man, incest, homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality |- | The Cider House Rules || || || || || || || || || || buggery, lesbianism, adultery, rape, incest, bestiality |- | A Prayer for Owen Meany || || || || || || || || || || asexualism, incestuous desires |- | A Son of the Circus || || || || || || || || || || transsexualism, homosexuality |- | A Widow for One Year || || || || (Amsterdam) || || || || || || older woman/younger man, rape, lesbianism |- | The Fourth Hand || || || || || || || || || || older woman/younger man |- | Until I Find You || || || || || || || || || || older woman/younger man, lesbianism, pedophilia |- | Last Night in Twisted River || || || || || || || || || || older woman/younger man, Ménage à trois |}
Irving has often used the literary technique of a story within a story.
Irving was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007, and subsequently had a radical prostatectomy.
* "In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."
* "I spend about two to three months planning the path of the book in my head before I write the last sentence of the novel. From there I work back to the beginning. From the day I think of the last sentence to the book's publication date, not more than a semicolon has changed."
* [on his process for writing novels:] "I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse."
* "A reader told me recently, in London, said that ‘well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.’ And I said, ‘oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.’"
* "Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved."
* "When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened."
*"I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known."
* "As a child, when something is denied you—when there is a subject that is never spoken of—you pretend it's for the best. But when I was denied information about someone as important as my actual father, I compensated for this loss by inventing him."
* "The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable—some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control."
* "When I feel like being a director, I write a novel."
* "Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel."
* (What he calls his incredibly popular novel "The World According to Garp"): "An artfully-disguised soap opera."
* (In reference to Vermont's Act 60): "This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people"
* "I don't go out of my way to find or invent things that are bizarre. It just seems to me that I notice more and more how commonplace the bizarre is."
*"I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did."
Category:1942 births Category:Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners Category:American feminist writers Category:American novelists Category:American screenwriters Category:Living people Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Mount Holyoke College faculty Category:National Book Award winners Category:People from Exeter, New Hampshire Category:Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Category:Writers from New Hampshire Category:University of Iowa alumni Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty Category:University of Pittsburgh people Category:21st-century novelists
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| Name | Harlan Ellison |
|---|---|
| Caption | Vol.2 cover to a collection of stories illustrated by Dark Horse Comics |
| Pseudonym | Cordwainer Bird Nalrah Nosille Sley Harson Paul Merchant |
| Birthname | Harlan Jay Ellison |
| Birthdate | May 27, 1934 |
| Birthplace | Cleveland, Ohio |
| Occupation | Author, screenwriter |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Speculative fiction, Science fiction, Fantasy, Crime, Mystery, Horror, film and television criticism, essayist |
| Movement | New Wave |
| Influences | Edgar Allan Poe Theodore Sturgeon Franz Kafka Jorge Luis Borges Frederic Prokosch Jim Thompson Gerald Kersh Cornell Woolrich Fritz Leiber Isaac Asimov |
| Influenced | Neil Gaiman Octavia E. Butler Dan Simmons James Cameron |
| Website | http://harlanellison.com/home.htm |
Harlan Jay Ellison (born May 27, 1934) is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.
His published works include over 1,000 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two ground-breaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. Ellison has won numerous awards - more awards for imaginative literature than any other living author - including multiple Hugos, Nebulas and Edgars.
Ellison attended Ohio State University for 18 months (1951–53) before being expelled. He has said that the expulsion was a result of his hitting a professor who had denigrated his writing ability, and that over the next forty-odd years he had sent that professor a copy of every story he published.
Ellison moved to New York City in 1955 to pursue a writing career, primarily in science fiction. Over the next two years, he published more than 100 short stories and articles. He married Charlotte Stein in 1956 but they divorced four years later. In 1957, Ellison decided to write about youth gangs. To research the issue, he joined a street gang in the Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York area, under the name "Cheech Beldone". His subsequent writings on the subject include the novel, Web of the City/Rumble, and the collection, The Deadly Streets, and also compose part of his memoir, Memos from Purgatory.
Ellison was drafted into the United States Army, serving from 1957 to 1959. In 1960, he returned to New York, living at 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Moving to Chicago, Ellison wrote for William Hamling's Rogue magazine. As a book editor at Hamling's Regency Books, Hamling published novels and anthologies by such writers as B. Traven, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch and Philip José Farmer, Clarence Cooper Jr and Ellison.
In the late 1950s, Ellison wrote a number of erotic stories, such as "God Bless the Ugly Virgin" and "Tramp", which were later reprinted in Los Angeles-based girlie magazines. That was his first use of the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird. He used the name in July and August 1957, in two journals, each of which had accepted two of his stories. In each journal, one story was published under the name Harlan Ellison, and the other under Cordwainer Bird. Later, as discussed in the Controversy section below, he used the pseudonym when he disagreed with the use or editing of his work.
In 1961, Ellison married Billie Joyce Sanders, his second wife, but they later divorced.
During the late 1960s, Ellison wrote a column about television for the Los Angeles Free Press. Titled "The Glass Teat", the column addressed political and social issues and their portrayal on television at the time. The columns were gathered into two collections, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.
He was a participant in the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Also in 1965, he married his third wife, Lory Patrick, but they later divorced.
In 1966, in an article that Esquire magazine would later name as the best magazine piece ever written, the journalist Gay Talese wrote about the goings-on around the enigmatic Frank Sinatra. The article, entitled "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", briefly describes a clash between the young Harlan Ellison and Frank Sinatra, when the crooner took exception to Ellison's boots during a billiards game.
Ellison continued to publish short fiction and nonfiction pieces in various publications, including some of his best known stories. "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965) is a celebration of civil disobedience against repressive authority. "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1967) is an allegory of Hell, where five humans are tormented by an all-knowing computer throughout eternity. The story was the basis of a 1995 computer game, with Ellison participating in the game's design and providing the voice of the god-computer AM. "A Boy and His Dog" examines the nature of friendship and love in a violent, post-apocalyptic world. It was made into the 1975 film of the same name, starring Don Johnson.
In 1976, Ellison married his fourth wife, Lori Horowitz. They later divorced. On September 7, 1986, Ellison married Susan Toth (his fifth wife), whom he had met in Scotland the year before.
He also edited the influential science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which collected stories commissioned by Ellison, accompanied by his commentary-laden biographical sketches of the authors. He challenged the authors to write stories at the edge of the genre. Many of the stories went beyond the traditional boundaries of science fiction pioneered by respected old school editors such as John W. Campbell, Jr. As an editor, Ellison was influenced and inspired by experimentation in the popular literature of the time, such as the beats. A sequel, Again Dangerous Visions, was published in 1972. A third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, has been repeatedly postponed (see Controversy).
Ellison served as creative consultant to the science fiction TV series The Twilight Zone (1980s version) and Babylon 5. As a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), he has voice-over credits for shows including The Pirates of Dark Water, Mother Goose and Grimm, Space Cases, Phantom 2040, and Babylon 5, as well as making an onscreen appearance in the Babylon 5 episode "The Face of the Enemy".
Ellison has commented on a great many movies and television programs (see The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat for television criticism and commentary; see Harlan Ellison's Watching for movie criticism and commentary), both negatively and positively.
He does all his writing on a manual Olympia typewriter, and has a substantial distaste for personal computers and most of the Internet.
For two years, beginning in 1986, Ellison took over as host of the Friday-night radio program, Hour 25 on Pacifica Radio station KPFK-FM, Los Angeles, after the death of Mike Hodel, the show's founder and original host. Ellison had been a frequent and favorite guest on the long-running program. In one episode, he brought in his typewriter and proceeded to write a new short story live on the air (he titled the story "Hitler Painted Roses"). Hour 25 also served as the inspiration for his story, "The Hour That Stretches".
Ellison's 1992 short story "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" was selected for inclusion in the 1993 edition of The Best American Short Stories.
Ellison was hired as a writer for Walt Disney Studios, but was fired on his first day after being overheard by Roy O. Disney in the studio commissary joking about making a pornographic animated film featuring Disney characters. He recounted this incident in his book Stalking the Nightmare, as part 3 of an essay titled "The 3 Most Important Things in Life".
Ellison has provided vocal narration to numerous audiobooks, both of his own writing and others. Ellison has helped narrate books by authors such as Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Williamson and Terry Pratchett.
Ellison lives in Los Angeles, California with Susan, his fifth wife. In 1994, he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery.
He had his own name trademarked in 2005, registered by The Kilimanjaro Corporation, which Ellison owns, and under which all his work is copyrighted.
Ellison recently voiced himself as a character on the show Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. In the Episode titled "The Shrieking Madness".
Ellison has on occasion used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert members of the public to situations in which he feels his creative contribution to a project has been mangled beyond repair by others, typically Hollywood producers or studios (see also Alan Smithee). The first such work to which he signed the name was "The Price of Doom," an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (though it was misspelled as Cord Wainer Bird in the credits). An episode of Burke's Law ("Who Killed Alex Debbs?") accredited to Ellison contains a character given this name.
The "Cordwainer Bird" moniker is a tribute to fellow SF writer Paul M. A. Linebarger, better known by his pen name, Cordwainer Smith. The origin of the word "cordwainer" is shoemaker (from working with cordovan leather for shoes). The term used by Linebarger was meant to imply the industriousness of the pulp author. Ellison has said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean "a shoemaker for birds". Since he has used the pseudonym mainly for works he wants to distance himself from, it may be understood to mean that "this work is for the birds" or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird. Stephen King once said he thought that it meant that Ellison was giving people who mangled his work a literary version of "the bird" (given credence by Ellison himself in his own essay titled "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto", describing his experience with the Starlost television series).
The Bird moniker has since become a character in one of Ellison's own stories, not without some prompting. In his book Strange Wine, Ellison explains the origins of the Bird and goes on to state that Philip Jose Farmer wrote Cordwainer into the Wold Newton family the latter writer had developed. The thought of such a whimsical object lesson being related to such lights as Savage, the Shadow, Tarzan, and all the other pulp heroes prompted Ellison to play with the concept, resulting in The New York Review Of Bird, in which an annoyed Bird uncovers the darker secrets of then begins pulpish slaughter of the New York Literary Establishment.
He appeared on Politically Incorrect, and had a regular spot on the Sci-Fi Buzz program on the fledgling Sci Fi Channel. Ellison's segments were broadcast from 1994 to 1997. Some transcripts are available. Ellison was also a frequent visitor on Tom Snyder's The Tomorrow Show in the late 1970s and The Late Late Show in the 1990s.
On March 13, 2009, Ellison sued CBS Paramount Television, seeking payment of 25% of net receipts from merchandising, publishing, and other income from the episode since 1967; the suit also names the Writers Guild of America for allegedly failing to act on Ellison's behalf. On October 23, 2009, Variety magazine reported that a settlement had been reached.
British science fiction author Christopher Priest critiqued Ellison's editorial practices in an article entitled "The Book on the Edge of Forever", later expanded into a book. Priest documented a half-dozen unfulfilled promises by Ellison to publish TLDV within a year of the statement. Priest claims he submitted a story at Ellison's request which Ellison retained for several months until Priest withdrew the story and demanded that Ellison return the manuscript. Ellison has a record of fulfilling obligations in other instances (though sometimes, as with Harlan Ellison's Hornbook for Mirage Press, several decades after the contract was signed), including to writers whose stories he solicited.
The book recounts the history of Fantagraphics and discussed a lawsuit that resulted from a 1980 Ellison interview with Fantagraphics' industry news magazine, The Comics Journal. In this interview Ellison referred to comic book writer Michael Fleisher, calling him "bugfuck" and "derange-o". Fleisher lost his libel suit against Ellison and Fantagraphics on December 9, 1986.
Ellison, after reading unpublished drafts of the book on Fantagraphics's website, believed that he had been defamed by several anecdotes related to this incident. He sued in the Superior Court for the State of California, in Santa Monica. Fantagraphics attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed. In their motion to dismiss, Fantagraphics argued that the statements were both their personal opinions and generally believed to be true anecdotes.
On February 12, 2007, the presiding judge ruled against Fantagraphics' anti-SLAPP motion for dismissal. On June 29, 2007, Ellison claimed that the litigation had been resolved pending Fantagraphics' removal of all references to the case from their website. No money or apologies changed hands in the settlement as posted on August 17, 2007.
Ellison responded three days later, writing, "I was unaware of any problem proceeding from my intendedly-childlike grabbing of Connie Willis's left breast, as she was exhorting me to behave." He also posted that "I'm glad, at last, to have transcended your expectations. I stand naked and defenseless before your absolutely correct chiding." On August 31 he posted: "Would you be slightly less self-righteous and chiding if I told you there was NO grab…there was NO grope…there was NO fondle...there was the slightest touch. A shtick, a gag between friends, absolutely NO sexual content. How about it, Mark: after playing straight man to Connie's very frequently demeaning public jackanapery toward me—including treating me with considerable disrespect at the Grand Master Awards Weekend, where she put a chair down in front of her lectern as Master of Ceremonies, and made me sit there like a naughty child throughout her long 'roast' of my life and career—for more than 25 years, without once complaining, whaddaya think, Mark, am I even a leetle bit entitled to think that Connie likes to play, and geez ain't it sad that as long as SHE sets the rules for play, and I'm the village idiot, she's cool … but gawd forbid I change the rules and play MY way for a change …", and complained that Willis had not called him to discuss the matter.
On April 24, 2000 Ellison sued Stephen Robertson for posting four stories to the newsgroup "alt.binaries.e-book" without authorization. The other defendants were AOL and RemarQ, internet service providers whose only involvement was running servers hosting the newsgroup. Ellison claimed that they had failed to stop the alleged copyright infringement in accordance with the "Notice and Takedown Procedure" outlined in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Robertson and RemarQ first settled with Ellison, then with AOL in June 2004 under conditions that were not made public. Since those settlements Ellison has initiated legal action and/or takedown notices against more than 240 people who have distributed his writings on the Internet, saying, "If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump".
Note: the White Wolf Edgeworks Series was originally scheduled to consist of 31 titles reprinted over the course of 20 omnibus volumes. Although an ISBN was created for Edgeworks. 5 (1998), which was to contain both Glass Teat books, this title never appeared. The series is noted for its numerous typographical errors.
See also The Starlost#1: Phoenix without Ashes (1975), the novelization by Edward Bryant of the teleplay for the pilot episode of The Starlost, which includes a lengthy afterword by Ellison describing what happened during production of the series.
;Notes
*Objects... was later included in the 2001 revised and expanded edition of The Essential Ellison.
"I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream" was included in American Fantastic Tales, volume II (from the 1940s to now), edited by Peter Straub and published by the prestigious Library of America in 2009. The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) included Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." In October 2010, a special collection was issued by MadCon, a convention in Wisconsin at which Ellison was the guest of honor. The hardcover book is entitled, (Garcia Publishing Services, 2010). In addition to including "How Interesting: A Tiny Man", Ellison's newest short story (previously published in "Realms of Fantasy" magazine), it also included "'Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man", "Some Frightening Films of the Forties" (a never before reprinted essay), an illustrated bibliography of Ellison's fiction books by Tim Richmond, an article by Robert T. and Frank Garcia on Ellisons television work, an appreciation/essay by Dark Horse Comics publisher Michael Richardson, an article about Deep Shag's audio recordings of Ellison speaking engagements by Michael Reed, a 6-page B&W; gallery of covers by Leo and Diane Dillon, a two-page Neil Gaiman-drawn cartoon and an official biography. In December 2010, Subterranean Press is releasing an expanded, revised, updated (and illustrated) version of Deathbird Stories, which will feature new introductory material, new afterwords, and additional stories (the never-before-collected, "From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet", "Scartaris, June 28th", and "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore").
He was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by International PEN, the international writers' union. In 1990, Ellison was honored by International PEN for continuing commitment to artistic freedom and the battle against censorship. In 1998, he was awarded the "Defender of Liberty" award by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
In March 1998, the National Women's Committee of Brandeis University honored him with their 1998 Words, Wit, Wisdom award. In 1990, Ellison was honored by International PEN for continuing commitment to artistic freedom and the battle against censorship.
Ellison was named 2002's winner of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal's "Distinguished Skeptic Award", in recognition of his contributions to science and critical thinking. Ellison was presented with the award at the Skeptics Convention in Burbank, California, June 22, 2002.
In December 2009, Ellison was nominated for a Grammy award in the category Best Spoken Word Album For Children for his reading of Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There for Blackstone Audio, Inc. This was his second Grammy nomination, the first coming in the late 1970s, for a self-produced reading (released via the Harlan Ellison Record Collection) of "Jeffty if Five."
One of the more benevolent is the main character in a mystery novel Murder at the A.B.A. by Isaac Asimov. The novel's main character and narrator is an author named "Darius Just", a thinly-disguised parody of Ellison, who serves as an amateur sleuth to solve the murder of a fellow author at the convention. Asimov intended the name "Darius Just" as a pun on "Dry As Dust". Ellison objected to the depiction: Darius Just is tall, whereas Ellison is taller. Just reappears in the Black Widowers mystery short story "The Woman in the Bar", which is unrelated to the novel, and after Asimov's death in the pastiche "The Last Story" by Charles Ardai.
Robert Silverberg's 1955 novel, Revolt on Alpha C, a retelling of the American Revolution set on a distant planet, features a character named "Harl Ellison," who is the first cadet (of a group that has been sent to restore order) to switch sides and join the revolutionaries.
Ben Bova's comic-SF novel The Starcrossed was inspired by Ellison's and Bova's experience on the Canada-produced miniseries The Starlost. In Bova's novel, a new television show is produced to encourage people to buy newly-invented 3D televisions. The Ellison character is a famous writer named Ron Gabriel. Although Bova is a friend of Ellison's, and his portrayal of Gabriel is admiring and sympathetic, the novel is broad comedy, and should not be read as a true roman a clef. Ellison gave a non-fiction account of his Starlost experience in a lengthy essay titled "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto".
Mike Friedrich and artist Dick Dillin paid a bizarre homage in the May 1971 issue of the comic book Justice League of America. In a hallucinatory story called "The Most Dangerous Dreams of All," the literary efforts of a flashy, insecure writer named Harlequin Ellis somehow become reality.
In the Ron Goulart novel Galaxy Jane, a birdman character by the name of Harlan Grzyb (author of I Have No Perch But I Must Sing and editor of Dangerous Birdcages) rages about the terrible things others have done to his script for the film Galaxy Jane.
In The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller featured Ellison by name as a television talking head. His only dialog elliptically anticipates a world where "[we'll] be eating our own babies for breakfast." Ellison and Miller are friends, the latter drawing the cover and writing the introduction for the stand-alone publication of Mefisto in Onyx.
In a somewhat less sympathetic vein, Ellison serves as a partial basis for a composite character in Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun. The novel is a satirical look at science fiction and fantasy fandom and conventions.
David Gerrold, in his 1980 Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool, makes mention of "Ellison's Star," a particularly unpredictable and "angry" White Dwarf star.
Yet another Ellison-character appears throughout a 1971 novel by Gerrold and Larry Niven, The Flying Sorcerers. The pantheon of gods in this story are all named after various SF writers. Ellison becomes Elcin, "The small, but mighty god of thunder" who will "Rain lightning down upon the heads" of those who "deny the power of the gods".
In an episode of the animated television show Freakazoid! entitled "And Fanboy is His Name," Freakazoid offers Fanboy "his very own Harlan Ellison" (as a slow, slightly dischordant version of For He's A Jolly Good Fellow plays on the soundtrack) in an attempt to convince Fanboy to stop following him.
In the 1970s, artist and cartoonist Gordon Carleton wrote and drew a scripted slide show called "City on the Edge of Whatever," which was a spoof of "The City on the Edge of Forever". Occasionally performed at Star Trek conventions, it featured an irate writer named "Arlan Hellison" who screamed at his producers, "Art defilers! Script assassins!"
Mystery Science Theater 3000 poked fun at Ellison in the episode "Mitchell", identifying a short irritable–looking man being booked into a police station as the writer and expressing some satisfaction at that notion. (Tom Servo: "They've arrested Harlan Ellison!" Joel Robinson: "Good.")
In "Halvah," Clifford Meth describes an interaction between an Ellison-like character named Cord (for Cordwainer Bird) and a throng of annoying fans. Ellison and Meth are friends, and Ellison provided an afterword to Meth's book god's 15 minutes.
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