Dean Ellis was an illustrator and painter who was born in the USA in 1920 and passed away in 2009. Ellis studied art at the Cleveland Institute of Art followed by a number of years at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art.
After his education Dean Ellis spent time in the military, serving in the Pacific during WWII. When the war was over he started working again as an artist and illustrator and in 1950, Life magazine picked up on his striking artwork and named him in a list of the 19 most promising young American artists.
In 1954 Dean Ellis moved to New York and became a commercial illustrator creating numerous artworks for magazines and advertisments, but he initially made his name creating sci-fi art for Bantam Books, especially with his distinctive artworks that he created for Bantam’s Ray Bradbury re-issues during the 1960s. Bantam Books comissioned Ellis to produce a set of covers for their early-1960s “New Bantam Edition” reissues of the works of Ray Bradbury. Ellis produced a set of stunning artworks and book covers that catapulted him into high demand and he was flooded with commissions from publishers who wanted to secure his talents for their own book covers.
