George Cockcroft

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George Cockcroft (born November 15, 1932), frequently misspelt "Cockroft", is an author who writes under the pen name Luke Rhinehart (see that article for information about his books).

[edit] Biography

George Cockcroft was born in the United States, son of an engineer and a civil servant. He got his BA at Cornell University, and his MA at Columbia University. Subsequently he got a PhD in psychology, also at Columbia. He married his wife, Ann on June 30, 1956. He currently has three children. At some point in his life he converted to Zen Buddhism.

After obtaining his PhD he went into teaching. During his years as a university teacher he taught, amongst other things, courses in Zen and Western literature. He first floated the idea of living by the dice in a lecture: the reaction was equal parts intrigue and disgust, and it was at this point he realised it could become a novel. Cockcroft started experimenting with dice a long time before writing The Dice Man, but this made progress on the novel rather slow. When he actually finished it he was 37, and lived in Majorca teaching English to hippies.

He met a publisher, probably in Deya, and thereby published the novel The Dice Man. In 1970 he became a full-time writer and "leader of the dice cult". In 1971 he was engaged in creating a dice centre in New York. In 1975 he was involved in a round-the-world voyage in a large trimaran ketch.

Later on he spent some time in a sailboat in the Mediterranean, and from there moved to a former Sufi retreat on the edge of a lake. His last known mailing address was Luke Hill in Canaan, New York. Email: [1].