Harlan

[lsanderson]

Impish Writer on the Edge of Tomorrow
By NATHAN LEE
Published: June 4, 2008

In “Dreams With Sharp Teeth,” the writer Harlan Ellison is variously described by friends and colleagues as “a hurricane,” “performance art,” “an alternately impish and furious 11-year-old boy,” “a cranky old Jew” and, most memorably by his buddy Robin Williams, as “a skin graft on a leper.”

What his enemies — like the man to whom he mailed a dead animal, or the one whose pelvis he broke in a heated meeting — make of him remains off the record.

Combative, motormouthed, irrepressibly opinionated and indefatigably productive, Mr. Ellison, now 74, is also, of course, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated popular writers: author of nearly 2,000 short stories, acclaimed TV episodes in the 1960s for “The Outer Limits” (“Demon With a Glass Hand”) and “Star Trek” (“The City on the Edge of Forever”), and a notoriously lousy screenplay (“The Oscar”). More