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Philip K. Dick (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Biography

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928, the son of Edgar and Dorothy Kindred Dick. He and his fraternal twin sister, Jane, were six weeks premature; Jane, the smaller and more frail of the two, died on January 26, 1929. When Dick was still a small boy, his mother told him about his sister's death. As a surviving twin, he felt a mixture of guilt and anger; in later years, he sometimes attributed Jane's death to his mother's negligence, probably unfairly so.

Some months after Jane's death, the Dick family moved to Berkeley, California,...

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