The Man in the High Castle Study Guide

Philip K. Dick was born a twin, but his baby sister died only a few months after their birth. This absence had profound consequences on Dick’s family life: his parents divorced before he was in kindergarten, and he and his mother moved, first to Washington, D.C. and then to Berkeley, California. Soon after graduating from UC Berkeley, Dick became a full-time writer, producing science-fiction stories and novels with incredible speed. Personally, Dick struggled with romantic relationships (he was married and divorced five times) and with an addiction to amphetamines. Professionally, Dick’s work was popular but did not garner the critical praise he so aspired to (though The Man in the High Castle, winner of the prestigious Hugo Award, was an exception). Dick’s drug abuse led him to operate with a great deal of paranoia, and eventually, to an untimely death; he passed away in in 1982, at the age of 54. After his death, scholars and critics began to revisit Dick’s work, and today he is considered a master of speculative fiction—in fact, he was the first science fiction author included in the prestigious Library of America series.

The Man in the High Castle namechecks many key historical moments, both real (like the bombing of Pearl Harbor) and imagined (like a German and Italian victory at Cairo). Of particular note is the exact instant at which Dick departs from the historical record: in the novel, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt is killed by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933, whereas in real life, Zangara’s assassination attempt was a failure. Moreover, while alternate history forms the backbone of the novel, Dick is himself emblematic of his own (real) historical moment. He lived just outside Berkeley (the hub of the counter-cultural art and activism that would define the 1960s) and he wrote publicly about rebelling against 1950s prosperity and conformity in his own more out-there, speculative work. And in his drug use, his fascination with UFOs, and his focus on altered states, Dick embodied many of the most pressing questions of his time.

Dick found his inspiration for The Man in the High Castle in Bring the Jubilee, a 1953 speculative novel that imagined a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War. To write with some precision about a Nazi takeover, Dick consulted several history books, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and biographies of both Hitler and Goebbels. Finally, Dick drew stylistically from Japanese and Tibetan poetry, and particularly from the haiku form; one such poem is even quoted in the novel itself.