George Cockcroft - Biography

Biography

George Cockcroft was born in the United States, son of an engineer and a civil servant. He received a BA from Cornell University and an MA from Columbia University. Subsequently he received a PhD in psychology, also from Columbia. He married his wife, Ann, on June 30, 1956. He has three children.

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 realized 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.

In 1971, a london based publisher, Talmy Franklin, published his first novel The Dice Man.

In 1970, he became a full-time writer and "leader of the dice cult". In 1971, he was engaged in the creation of a dice center in New York City. 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, where he taught English, 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.