In some sense none of these developments seems new. Of Ellison's chosen mentors, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ambrose Bierce, each has one or both of two things in common with Ellison--moral outrage at institutionalized human stupidity and a subversive sense of humor. They also share his evasion of easy labels.
Although he is generally associated with science fiction, Ellison has published several novels in a more naturalistic mode, based on his experiences with juvenile gangs, the drug culture, and the popular music business. He has also written screenplays for movies and television and has contributed columns to various newspapers, most notably the Los Angeles Free Press, which published his television commentaries from 1968 to 1972. In his journalism and in his editorial introductions both to his own story collections and to the important anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Ellison has created a vivid, distinctive voice that occasionally threatens to overwhelm his fiction and subsume his whole written work into a single autobiographical text filled with elaborate myths of self and other, with masks, charades, and competing gods, both false and true.
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