Free Republic

The late Philip K. Dick, born 86 years ago today in Chicago, is something of a cautionary figure in American literature: brilliant, prolific, often sloppy, and woefully underappreciated during his lifetime. It was only with the 1982 release of the film "Blade Runner" (loosely based on his 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") that Dick's work truly began to saturate the mainstream; by that point, he had been dead for four months. In the ensuing three decades, Dick's novels and stories have served as fodder for dozens of Hollywood movies; they have been reissued again and again. In...