Rodzher Zhelyazny

Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American science fiction writer.

Roger Zelazny was born on May 13, 1937, in the city of Euclid, Ohio, to the family of the Pole Józef Żelazny (Żelazny means “iron” in Polish) and the Irishwoman Josephine Sweet Zelazny. By the age of ten, Roger was already writing fairy tales. In 1955 he graduated from high school and entered the psychology department of Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He changed his major, transferring from psychology to English literature. Two years later he received a bachelor’s degree and moved to Columbia University in New York. In 1962 he earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in “Drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.”

During his student years, Zelazny practiced judo and martial arts, wrote and published poetry, wrote but did not publish science fiction stories, learned to play chess, studied Hindi and Japanese, and became interested in meditation and mysticism.

At the end of 1960 he enlisted in the National Guard and served six months in Texas. From 1963 to 1966 he was a U.S. Army reservist. For a time he was part of a Nike missile crew, and in the last years of his service he served in a psychological warfare unit, from which he was honorably discharged.

In 1962, Amazing Stories published his first story, “Passion Play.” He received his first Hugo Award for the novella A Rose for Ecclesiastes (1963), and in 1965 he achieved complete success — another Hugo and two Nebulas.

In 1964 he married Sharon Steberl and divorced in 1966. After the National Guard, he worked in the social security system. In 1965 he was transferred to Baltimore, Maryland; at the same time, in 1967–68, he served as secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America. In Baltimore he met Judith Alene Callahan, whom he married on August 20, 1966, and who gave birth to three children — sons Devin (1971) and Jonathan Trent (1976), and daughter Shannon (1979).

In 1968, on Robert Silverberg