His twin sister died a baby in 1928.
He died lonely in 1982, his mind filled with swirling pink lights, three-eyed invaders and messages from the Roman Empire.
Science Fiction author Philip K. Dick has been called “a restless observer of American postwar malaise.” His writing inspired such films as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.

He spent his life in pursuit of the question: What is real?

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…. So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

– Philip K. Dick

“Every whorl of Dick’s mind, every delusion, every leap through the looking glass, is chronicled. The effect is powerful.” —James Parker, The Boston Globe

“[A] painful and unconventional biography [that] portrays Dick as a Cold War Don Quixote, flailing at the totalitarianism he suspected was taking over 1950s-60s America.” —Publishers Weekly