Luke Rhinehart, Date of Birth, Place of Birth

    

Luke Rhinehart

American writer

Date of Birth: 15-Nov-1932

Place of Birth: Albany, New York, United States

Profession: writer, novelist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio


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About Luke Rhinehart

  • George Powers Cockcroft (born November 15, 1932), widely known by the pen name Luke Rhinehart, is an American novelist, screenwriter, and nonfiction writer, with at least ten books to his name.
  • He is best known for his 1971 novel The Dice Man, the story of a psychiatrist who experiments with making life decisions based on the roll of a die, including, near the novel's onset, the rape of his best friend's wife.Cockroft has described the origin of the idea for this seminal work variously, however, at the time of the publication of this work, "it was not clear whether the book was fiction or autobiography", all the more because its protagonist and author were eponymous, both were described as having the same profession (psychiatry), and elements of the described lives of both (e.g., places of residence, date of birth) were also in common; hence, curiosity over its authorship have persisted since its publication.
  • Emmanuel Carrère, writing for The Guardian, presented a long-form expose on Cockroft and the relationship between author and legend in 2019, and in following with others, established the author Cockcroft as a life-long English professor living "in an old farmhouse with a yard that slopes down to a duck pond", a husband of fifty-years, father of three, and a caregiver to a special needs child.The Dice Man was critically well received.
  • It quickly became, and remains thought of as a cult classic.
  • It initially sold poorly in the United States, but well in Europe, particularly England, Sweden, Denmark, and Spain.
  • Writing in 2017 for The Guardian, Tanya Gold noted that "over the course of 45 years" it was still in print, had become famous, had devoted fans, and had "sold more than 2m copies in multiple languages" (e.g., as many as 27 languages and 60 countries have been claimed).
  • In 1995, the BBC called it "one of the fifty most influential books of the last half of the twentieth century," and in 1999, after one of their reporters experimented, controversially, with dicing, Loaded magazine named it "Novel of the Century".
  • In 2013, Alex Clark of the Telegraph chose it as one of the fifty greatest cult books of the last hundred years.Cockroft continued themes—both comical and philosophical—introduced in The Dice Man—in two later novels, Adventures of Wim (1986) and The Search for the Dice Man (1993), as well as in a companion title, The Book of the Die (2000), none of which achieved the commercial success of The Dice Man.
  • First published in 1971, The Dice Man was twice spoken of in the early 2000s as enjoying a renaissance, though a scholar writing on the subject has indicated no formal evidence for such.

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