Philip K. Dick

Philip Dick was an American science-fiction writer.

He was born on December 16, 1928, together with his twin sister, in Chicago. Because of financial problems, his mother was admitted to the hospital later than planned, and on the 41st day of his life Philip’s sister died. Both Philip’s father and mother worked for the government. Joseph Edgar Dick was a newspaper censor, while Dorothea Grant edited official speeches for government officials. This may explain the fact that from early childhood Dick hated everything connected with censorship and state power.

Philip’s parents divorced when he was three years old. He moved with his mother from Illinois to California. Later his classmates remembered him as a joker and a fabulist. Even then he began writing poems and stories. Some of them were published in a local newspaper. At 14 he wrote his first juvenile novel, a continuation of the story of Gulliver, titled Back to Lilliput.

In the final years of school, Dick began to develop health problems that would plague him all his life. He suffered from asthma, tachycardia, and agoraphobia—a pathological fear of open spaces. His relationship with his mother became completely strained. At 18 he moved out and settled in a commune of homosexual artists. In May 1948, Dick met a girl named Janet Marilyn and almost immediately married her. It was a brief romance: six months later the marriage was dissolved, and the former spouses never saw each other again.

After finishing school, Philip took a job in a small record store. He later recalled that he liked the job because he could listen to music day and night—Beethoven and his favorite blues. By September 1949, after moving into a more or less decent apartment, Dick applied to the University of California, where he enrolled in philosophy and German-language courses. However, for sympathy toward “red” (communist) ideology, he was very soon expelled from there.

Dick’s tachycardia made itself felt. A dependence on the medications prescribed to him gradually developed. He met his second wife, Cleo Apostolides, a Berkeley student, in 1949. Cleo was three years younger than Philip; she was 19. Despite everything, this was the happiest and most romantic period of his life. The house rented