I'd like to start working through Harlan Ellison's works; his personality, fame (and infamy), his contributions to television and what I've heard of the novel I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream have intrigued me no end. Where should I begin?
You've got quite a bit ahead of you, then. At last count, Ellison has had over 1500 stories published, iirc; this doesn't include the even more numerous essays, or his screenplays, etc. On the latter... most of those haven't been published, but a handful have, and are well worth reading. Even in his scripts, there's a lot of fire in the writing itself, not just the dialogue. Incidentally, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" isn't a novel -- of which Harlan has done very few -- but an award-winning short story, heavily anthologized. When Nesa mentioned The Essential Ellison, however, she brought in the best source for the authorative text of this tale, which has often suffered from errors creeping into the different printings.....
I started with Angry Candy and went on to read his collections of stories as and when I got them. I have also been reading following recommendations from JD Worthington.
I don't think there is a specific reading order but I might be wrong, in which case someone like JD would be your best bet.
There is however a book entitled The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective, which might provide a good place to begin.
While there isn't a particular reading order (generally speaking), it might be helpful to keep in mind the order of publication of various stories, as his earlier work shows that it's early work. Not that it isn't worth reading (quite a bit of it is), but that it shows the faults of a young writer learning his craft; and reading these after having read later work, when he became more skilled and polished, takes some readjusting.
Other than this general caveat, Ellison's largely a reader one can pick up in any order and read accordingly. This is evident even with the various reprinting programs of his work, which have never paid much attention to chronology. For example, the series from the 1970s began its run with
The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television, which was first released as a book (rather than a series of columns) in 1970; the companion volume,
The Other Glass Teat, containing the remainder of the series, didn't see print until 1975, for reasons set forth in the introductions to the two volumes; this was published as #5 of that series. The second volume in that series was a revised edition of
Paingod and Other Delusions (1965), with a much lengthier introduction; the third volume was
Memos from Purgatory, Ellison's 1961 recounting of his days with a street gang (which he had joined as a young writer looking for material) and the fallout years later from that... and so on. The same sort of "mix-and-match" is true for the series of the 1980s and White Wolf's Edgeworks series as well... though the latter includes books that had not seen print in quite some time, or (in one case) that had only been published as a very limited special edition.
Speaking of his introductions... unlike some writers' introductions, which are sometimes interesting (sometimes not) but are not really necessary adjuncts to the books they're in, Ellison's intros are very much a part of the book, and are also very, very much a part of Ellison; they're most often essays in their own right, and thought-provoking (and sometimes simply provoking) and damned fine examples of the art themselves.
And, if you'd like a little more about his biblio, with some notes on each selection, you could do a lot worse than check things out here:
http://www.islets.net/biblio.html
I'll be interested in seeing what someone else has to say about the man and his work....
Oh, and Ellison is also quite good as a raconteur, as well, so you might want to check out the recordings of the man, to boot. There are numerous recordings of him reading his stories, but there are also three rather peripitatic volumes of
On the Road with Harlan Ellison, which are currently available as well
Deep Shag® Records - Harlan Ellison
But the thing about one of Ellison's reviews is that it makes you think out your arguments in opposition if you disagree, and will even prick you to think things through more thorougly if you agree.
