The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike was written by Philip K. Dick in the winter and spring of 1960, in Point Reyes Station, California. In the sequence of Dick’s work, it was written immediately after Confessions of a Crap Artist and just before The Man in the High Castle, the Hugo Award–winning science fiction novel that ushered in the next stage of Dick’s career.

 

This novel, Dick said, is about Leo Runcible, “a brilliant, civic minded liberal Jew living in a rural WASP town in Marin County, California.” Runcible, a real estate agent involved in a local battle with a neighbor, finds what look like Neanderthal bones in Marin and dreams of rising real estate prices because of the publicity.

But it turns out that the remains are more recent, the result of an environmental problem polluting the local water supply.