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You built an image out of the man outside of the thing he is widely known for and then are surprised to find out that your image of the man doesn't match?
surprised_pikachu_face.png
Anyone who has even tangentially heard of I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream or any of its many, many derivative works could tell exactly who he is. Harlan Ellison is a viciously angry, frequently bitter to the point of actively poisoning his readers, incredibly gifted writer.
I give him a lot of slack because anyone filled with such seething, frothing rage is the exact opposite of the people who write soft pap dripping with apathy these days. His fiction has a lot of this as a result: he raged against what he saw as the dying of the light. The works he's become most famous for are alarm bells, warnings, bitter screeds, portraits of existential evil and beasts naked shivering in the dark.
And yes, he was also writing lurid scifi for subsistence, so churning out large volumes of work and acting out as a shock jock to get attention and eyeballs on his work would feed back into it.
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