On This Day: Jerry Yulsman

Writer and photographer Jerome (Jerry) Yulsman was born on this day in 1924. Beginning his career as a military photographer, Yulsman served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. He returned to New York as a freelance photographer, chronicling the cultural rebellion and renaissance of post-war America in Greenwich Village. His photography appeared in Colliers, Pageant, Look, LIFE and Playboy, among others, and his 1957 image of Jack Kerouac, posed in the glow of a neighbourhood bar sign, has become one of 20th century photography’s iconic images.

Yulsman began writing in the early ’80s, producing a number of novels across different genres; his best-known work is the alternative history, Elleander Morning:

When the mysterious, beautiful Elleander Morning, travels through time to Vienna in 1913, her aim is not to visit the birthplace of Schubert and Strauss. Instead, she has come to assassinate a struggling young artist. His name: Adolf Hitler.

But 60 years on, long after Elleander has changed the path of the world, a mysterious book – the history of a terrible, global war that never was – threatens to unravel reality. As the horrific past – a past that never happened – begins to reassert itself, billions of lives lie in the balance . . .

Elleander Morning is a seductive, compelling alternate history in the tradition of The Man in the High Castle. It is available as a Fantasy Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook. You can read more about Jerry Yulsman in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.