Wyatt Emory Cooper

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Wyatt Emory Cooper (September 1, 1927 – January 5, 1978) was an author and screenwriter.

Cooper was born in Quitman, Mississippi, and later moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, as a child.

Cooper moved to New York in his twenties to pursue acting. When he was 26, he appeared on Broadway in the cast of The Strong Are Lonely, a drama that ran for a week at the Broadhurst Theatre in the fall of 1953. Cooper also wrote stories and plays.

In his thirties Cooper lived in Los Angeles and worked as a screenwriter. He was close friends with Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell; he wrote a lengthy profile of Parker in Esquire magazine following her death in 1967. Cooper moved to Manhattan in the early 1960s and worked as a magazine editor.

He married Gloria Vanderbilt on December 24, 1963; Cooper was her fourth husband. The couple frequently made the national "best-dressed" list. They had two sons, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper (1965-1988) and Anderson Cooper (b. 1967). "It is in the family that we learn almost all we ever know of loving," he wrote in his 1975 memoir. "In my sons' youth, their promise, their possibilities, my stake in immortality is invested."

Wyatt Emory Cooper died in New York City during open heart surgery at the age of 50.