Confessions of a Crap Artist was written in 1959. It is a tour de force, one of the most extraordinary novels I’ve ever read. There are, I believe, two essential reasons why it has taken Philip K. Dick sixteen years to get this novel published. The first reason is the intensity of the picture the author paints. This is the sort of book that makes editors shiver with (perhaps unconscious) revulsion, and leaves them grasping at any sort of excuse (“I don’t like the shifting viewpoint”) to reject it and get it out of their minds. The people are too real.

The second reason is that it is a “mainstream” novel written by an author who had already established himself as a fairly successful science fiction writer. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a science fiction writer to be accepted as a serious novelist when he’s not writing science fiction.

Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. He began writing professionally in the early 1950’s, and although he steadily submitted short stories and novels to mainstream publishers as well as science fiction markets throughout the 1950’s, it was only as a science fiction writer that he was able to get into print. His first short story appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1952; his first novel, Solar Lottery, was published by Ace Books in 1955. Since then, he has had thirty-one other books published in the United States, all of them science fiction.

Despite Dick’s considerable popularity—in North America and especially in Europe (where over 100 different editions of his books are in print)—Confessions of a Crap Artist is the first non-science-fiction book by Philip K. Dick that has ever been published. It is one of at least eleven “experimental mainstream novels” (his term) that Dick wrote during the first ten years of his professional career.