RIP. Cranky and litigious but one hell of a writer.
Yes, he was quite the curmudgeon. I used to like his appearances on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show. I liked a lot of his stories. Even if I didn't always agree with his viewpoints, I still liked the way he expressed them. I saw him at one of the rare Sci-fi conventions I attended and he read one of the stories from his Shatterday collection. Among my favorites of his stories were The Deathbird and Delusion for a Dragon Slayer.
In an interview once, Ellison mentioned admiring the stories of a South American writer named Jorge Luis Borges. I started reading Borges' stories and I daresay I found similarities between the two writers.