Philip K. Dick in Orange County

“Philip K. Dick in Orange County” website has launched with the following background provided by SFWA member, Dr. David Sandner:


In 1972, Philip K. Dick moved to Fullerton, California, in Orange County, at the behest of Dr. Willis McNelly, Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. Dick lived in the OC for ten years until his death in 1982, and left his manuscripts and papers to CSUF’s Special Collections in the library. In the Spring of 2014, I taught the first Digital Literary Studies class for the English Department at CSUF. As a final collaborative assignment, our class, using the fact of Dick’s presence on our campus, created our website. With the site, we intend to document and share CSUF’s literary history by creating digital archives both aggregating and ordering what was out there into relevant links and commenting upon it from our own perspective, and creating our own content through interviews, new explorations, and research.

Here are the highlights of the site:

  • Google Earth maps of places Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County and of locations mentioned in A Scanner Darkly and Radio Free Albemuth.
  • A new inventory of recent changes to the Special Collections holdings of Dick’s work that documents what the Dick estate removed in the past few years and now holds privately. An early document by Dr. McNelly and a new video interview with the Special Collections Librarian tells the story of the holdings from their arrival at CSUF to now.
  • A new video interview with Tim Powers.
  • Archives including: local media write ups of PKD in the OC by the LA Times, OC Weekly, Rolling Stone, and others; letters and other documents; photos; and more from 1972-1982.

A Facebook page has also been established.