Point Reyes Cypress Press has just published a newly revised and expanded Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick. The original version, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 1993, lists for $119.95. The new book is at the much more affordable price of $17.00 (ISBN: 978-0-9841205-0-5), but currently only available from the Point Reyes Cypress Press web site.
The author writes that the book is “part memoir, and part a kind of detective novel.” In it, she “sifts through the details of her life with Philip K. Dick, a prolific genius whose books and novels are being recognized as significant works of literature. Much of Dick’s work, currently being celebrated in college courses and prestigious anthologies like The Library of America, consists of a kind of surreal autobiography and Anne’s memoir helps us connect his fictional characters to his life. Philip K. Dick was quite a character himself, both on and off the page, and Anne’s memoir bravely explores her tumultuous relationship with this mercurial man in an attempt to better understand him and his writing. A touching aspect of this memoir is that it represents Anne’s search as well.”
Anne was Dick’s third wife, and lived with him from 1958 to 1964, during which time he wrote the novels that made him world famous: Confessions of a Crap Artist, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. He accurately chronicled the beginnings of Anne’s jewelry business in his most famous novel, The Man in the High Castle.
Anne still lives in the modern Campbell and Wong house she shared with Philip, a house that was featured in many of Dick’s books. She hopes that reading her memoir will “open up many of Philip’s works, revealing the autobiographical material often buried deep in his texts. Biography lovers will enjoy the intensity of detail Anne brings to Dick’s complex and intense struggles. Anne spent several years conducting interviews with Dick’s friends, family, and colleagues, assembling perhaps the most thoroughly researched biography of Philip K. Dick currently available.”
Anne Dick (nee Williams) was born in West Englewood, New Jersey, in 1927. After moving to St. Louis, she attended the Principia secondary school and graduated from Washington University in 1947. After the death of her first husband, poet Richard Rubenstein, she studied metal sculpture with Harry Crotty at College of Marin and later based her jewelry designs on the welded sculpture techniques she had learned there. Her bronze and silver jewelry has been sold in museum stores and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. Retired from the jewelry business after 47 years, she continues to write novels and poetry. She still lives in the same house where she lived with Philip K. Dick and raised her four daughters (one of whom was Dick’s).