About the Author
An acclaimed science fiction writer with over forty novels to his credit, Philip K. Dick's reputation and his following have both steadily grown in the years since his death. Born in 1928 in Chicago, his family relocated to Berkeley, California when Dick was two years old. His early life was somewhat traumatic and tumultuous. His twin sister, Jane, died at just over one month old due in part to parental neglect. After his parents divorced in 1932, Dick and his mother moved frequently, living for a time in Washington, D.C., and in different sections of Berkeley.



Suffering from agoraphobia and other psychological maladies, Dick entered high school in 1944, graduated in 1947, and enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley in 1948. There he studied philosophy, but left without earning a degree.



After a stint working in a record store, Dick turned his attention to writing, beginning with short stories. In 1954 he finished his first novel, Solar Lottery, but it wasn't until the publication of The Man in the High Castle in 1963 that Dick's work began to be recognized. That novel won that year's Hugo award and would remain his most acclaimed work until 1974's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which won the John W. Campbell Award.



None of his works, however, achieved the prominence of 1968's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, his grim futuristic fantasy that inspired the breakthrough film Blade Runner (1982).



Dick's adult life was often as turbulent as his early years. He was married and divorced on numerous occasions, suffered through many illnesses, and overcame an amphetamine addiction. In the late 1970's, he had what he considered an encounter with a force from outer space that he called Valis. His experience instilled his later work with a quasi-mystical sensibility. Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of heart failure.