Described by fellow author J. G. Ballard as "an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts his life at a shout and his fiction at a scream," Harlan Ellison is a writer who actively resists being labeled. Though he has written or edited sixty books and has authored more than eleven hundred short stories, he dislikes being called prolific; though his works of fiction and nonfiction are often considered iconoclastic, opinionated, and confrontational, he bristles at the label "irrepressible"; and, though he has garnered numerous major awards from science fiction organizations, he adamantly refuses to be categorized as a science fiction writer, preferring the term "magic realism" to define his writing.

Ellison began his writing career in the mid-1950s after being dismissed from college over a disagreement with a writing teacher who told Ellison that he had no talent. Ellison moved to New York City to become a...