Philip K. Dick

Dick's twin sister died weeks after their birth in 1928, a loss he carried as lifelong guilt and returned to obsessively across his fiction's doubled and false selves. Raised in Berkeley, he wrote at a furious pace for pulp science-fiction magazines through the 1950s and 60s, married five times, and lived for years in genuine financial precarity, churning out novels for advances that barely covered rent.

In February and March of 1974 he experienced a series of intense visionary episodes he spent the rest of his life trying to interpret theologically and scientifically, filling thousands of pages of a private journal later published as The Exegesis. The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award in 1963, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became the basis for the film Blade Runner.

He died of a stroke in 1982, months before Blade Runner's release brought his ideas to a mainstream audience he never lived to see.