Typed letter signed to Claudia Bush.. This item is unavailable.Typed letter signed to Claudia Bush.

A typed letter signed from Dick, with nine manuscript corrections, to MA student Claudia Krenz Bush, who was writing her thesis on Dick, published as "The Splintered Shards: Reality and Illusion in the Novels of Philip K. Dick". In this letter, Dick is full of praise for Claudia's writing ("your letter to me is so well written that I think I will apply for a grant to write a thesis on your letters"), warns her repeatedly against unscrupulous academics ("they will rip you off baby, I mean it. They will fucking steal your insights and call them their own"), and skirts around flirtation: "When you don't have anything marketable yet, they're not interested; but you have, Claudia (I refer, ahem, to your writing)". He extols her writing and encourages her to continue: "Claudia, you should do a novel in the first person, like Henry Miller or Celine; it'd cause Western Civilization to cash in on the spot, and we'd all get off on that, by golly. If I tell you that in a number of ways I genuinely do regard you as a superb writer, you must believe me, and I would know, because I can tell good prose, funny and acute prose, original prose, right-on prose, and, best of all, the authentic prose of our people. We do have a prose, we Americans. Heller has it, Saul Bellow has it - you do too, Claudia. you'll see that I came close to having it, close enough to know it when someone else has it". He mentions draft notes for a "very personal" novel which "will show how really wild, how REALLY WILD my inner life is" and ends the letter with a complicated cryptographic decoding of the word "Albemuth", revealed to him in a dream, and later used in the title to his novel Radio Free Albemuth (1985). This letter is published in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick (1993). Three leaves (280 x 216 mm), each typed one side only. Stains to edges, else well-preserved.…