A Lit Fuse

The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, 2nd Edition

By Nat Segaloff

2021

First Published

4.34

Average Rating

680

Number of Pages

20H45M

Audio Length

An unguarded, uncensored, unquiet tour of the life of Harlan Ellison. In late 2011 Harlan Ellison—the multi-award-winning writer of speculative fiction and famously litigious personality—did two uncharacteristic things. First, he asked biographer Nat Segaloff if he’d be interested in writing his life story. Second, he gave Segaloff full control. The result is the long-anticipated A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison. The expansive biography, which is the first such project in which Ellison has permitted large portions of his varied works to appear. Segaloff conducted exhaustive interviews with Ellison over the course of five years and also spoke with many of his friends and enemies in an effort to get inside the man and pin down the best-known “Harlan stories.” Their wide-ranging discussions cover his bullied boyhood, his storied marriages, his fabled lawsuits, and his compulsive writing process with more depth and detail than has ever before appeared in print. But it also delves into the man’s deeply held principles, his fears, and the demons that drove him for all of his 84 years. Friends, colleagues, and admirers such as Neil Gaiman, Patton Oswalt, Peter David, Robert Sawyer, Michael Scott, Edward Asner, Leonard Nimoy, Ed Bryant, Alan Brennert, Robert Silverberg, and many other notables add their voices. Along the way the reader is treated to an analysis of the Connie Willis controversy, the infamous dead gopher story, allegedly pushing a fan down an elevator shaft, and the final word on The Last Dangerous Visions. What emerges is a rich portrait of a man who has spent his life doing battle with his times and himself, always challenging his readers to reach for a higher plane and goading himself to get them there. It’s funny, wise, shocking, and—well, it’s Harlan. In January 2021, an expanded second edition was released only in ebook form, covering events after Harlan Ellison's death in June, 2018. The second edition was reprinted in hardcover form in September 2022. The additional material also includes interviews with many of Harlan's friends and coda covering the death of Harlan's wife, Susan Ellison.

Avg Rating

4.34

Number of Ratings

156

5 STARS

48%

4 STARS

40%

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1 STARS

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Author

Nat Segaloff

Author · 14 books

Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film industry for The Boston Herald, but has also variously been a studio publicist (Fox, UA, Columbia), college teacher (Boston University, Boston College), and broadcaster (Group W, CBS, Storer). He is the author of twenty books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn: American Director and Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors in addition to career monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John Milius. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Out (US), MacWorld and American Movie Classics Magazine. He was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine. In 1996 he formed the multi-media production company Alien Voices with actors Leonard Nimoy and actor John de Lancie and produced five best-selling, fully dramatized audio plays for Simon & Schuster: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon, all of which feature Star Trek casts.