Confessions of a Crap Artist is, in Phil Dick’s opinion, easily the finest of his non-science fiction novels, and one of the best books he has ever written (ranking, in the undersigned’s opinion, with Dick’s Hugo-Award-winning The Man In The High Castle and his equally brilliant Martian Time-Slip). It is also, I think, one of the most penetrating novels anyone has written about life in America in the midtwentieth century.
Philip K. Dick was living in Point Reyes, California, when he wrote this novel, Shortly after completing it, he married the woman who had inspired him to create Fay Hume, and they lived together for the next five years.
New York City,
February, 1975
1
I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it, because I have it bound in. My friends are made out of water, too. All of them. The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our livings.
Actually there’s even a greater problem. We don’t feel at home anywhere we go. Why is that?
The answer is World War Two.
World War Two began on December 7, 1941. In those days I was sixteen years old and going to Seville High. As soon as I heard the news on the radio I realized that I was going to be in it, that our president had his opportunity now to whip the Japs and the Germans, and that it would take all of us pulling shoulder to shoulder. The radio was one I built myself. I was always putting together superhet five-tube ac-dc receivers. My room was overflowing with earphones and coils and condensers, along with plenty of other technical equipment.