The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick

Auto/biographical literature has been theorized with metaphors that reflect its inherent instability as a form of truth-telling. The best auto/biographies exhibit a metanarrational awareness of this instability and favor the art of writing over the alleged “truth” of a life. The autobiographical nature of Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories has spawned a sizable body of biographical texts, many of which are creative performances that give primacy to the artistic impulse. Most critical biographies about Dick, on the other hand, do not account for this dynamic; instead, they read the fiction as a symptom of the author’s notorious drug use and schizoid tendencies. Bolstered by scholarship on Auto/Biography and Science Fiction Studies as well as psychoanalytic theory, The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions surveys and analyzes the proliferation of “biotexts” written about the science-fiction icon, who consistently eroded the boundary between lived and imagined experience, turning his own precarious sense of reality into the generative engine for his fiction and the biographical mythology that continues to orbit his work.