The beginnings for this popular novelist began in Chicago, Illinois, where he was born to a middle-class family. His twin sister, Jane, weaker than him at birth, died in less than a month. When Dick found out about his twin's death, many years later, he was confused and angry, and often blamed his mother. When Dick was young, the family moved to the San Francisco, California area. When Dick was just five years old, his father was transferred to Reno, Nevada, and his mother refused to move with him. This decision caused some family trauma as Dick's father fought for custody. But Dick's mother was ahead of her time, a staunch feminist when there was hardly a word for that ideal. She held on to her values and moved Dick to Washington, D.C., where she found a job. Within a few years, she moved Dick back to California, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Dick mastered the skill of typing when he was twelve, and that seemed to unleash his prodigious imagination. Right around this time, Dick read his first science fiction magazine. "And like many troubled boys of the time," commented Alexander Star in the New Republic, "he became a voracious reader of the science fiction pulp magazines that were then at their peak." This combination of his feverish reading of science fiction stories and his furious typing propelled him towards his vocation of science fiction writer.
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