Philip K. Dick

Biography

Philip Kindred Dick (1928–1982) was an American science fiction writer whose visionary novels and stories have become among the most influential works of 20th-century literature. Born in Chicago and raised in California, Dick published his first story in 1952 and went on to produce an extraordinary body of work: 44 published novels and approximately 121 short stories over three decades. His fiction obsessively explores questions of reality, identity, perception, and what it means to be human—often through paranoid, hallucinatory narratives in which characters discover that their world is not what it seems. Major novels include The Man in the High Castle (1962, Hugo Award winner), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, basis for Blade Runner), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and VALIS (1981). Dick wrote prolifically but lived in poverty for most of his life, gaining little mainstream recognition until after his death. His work has since been adapted into numerous major films—Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau—and he is now recognized as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.