Memos from Purgatory

An Autobiography

From the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Strange Wine: A gritty memoir of life in NYC that became the basis for a Hitchcock TV drama.

Hemingway said, “A man should never write what he doesn’t know.” In the mid‑fifties, Harlan Ellison—kicked out of college and hungry to write—went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn’s dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a “bopping club.” What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour‑long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not be able to ignore or forget.