American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

In this episode we start to look at Philip K. Dick's CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST, written in the late 1950s. It was a mainstream novel that explores some interesting themes of family and new religious movements.

Philip K. Dick has been writing obliquely about Malthus since some of his earliest stories. In the "Pre-Persons" Dick takes on these issues again, and along the way angered the feminists. Is this story just his response to Roe v. Wade or does it have a more significant place in his argument against gerontocracy?

The highlight of Thomas Jefferson's retirement letters are those he wrote to John Adams. In this episode, we look at some of those and some other important and interesting letters he wrote in 1813, 1814, and 1815.

In this set of letters, I look at Jefferson's last years in public life and the interests he pursued after retirement. Much of his work in this period involves education, culminating in his work on the University of Virginia.

In this wonderful little story ("A Little Something for Us Tempunauts") Philip K. Dick explores the tedious repeatability of space exploration, both for us and for the explorers. Maybe we can do better if we had a real frontier?

In this lengthy episode, I take a detailed look at FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID by Philip K. Dick. It presents a detailed police state, examines class dynamics in authoritarian societies, and has some of Dick's most touching looks at relationships and the futility of liquid relationships.

In this selection of the letters of Thomas Jefferson we explore the "Revolution of 1800" and Jefferson's first term as president. The achievements of this period are well known, but more interesting may be his internal thoughts about his presidency.

In the conclusion of WE CAN BUILD YOU by Philip K. Dick, we find ourselves in a very different novel. After a mental breakdown Louis Rosen is institutionalized and we see one of Dick's best descriptions of the asylum.

Thomas Jefferson comes back from Paris to become Secretary of State. Fights with everyone. Decides to do it himself and runs for president. Let's watch the rise of the party system in American politics by looking at Jefferson's letters from the 1790s.

Well, they got an Abe Lincoln bot and all was going well, but they lost their designer and engineer. How can our little startup survive against the big corporations without its greatest minds? Find out in part 3 of my review of WE CAN BUILD YOU.