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George Cook was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1875. Cook wrote novels and for a time worked under Floyd Dell on the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review.

In 1915 Cook became involved in the Provincetown Theatre Group. The play, Suppressed Desires, that she co-wrote with his wife Susan Glaspell, was one of the first plays performed by the group. He also wrote the anti-war play, The Athenian Women during the First World War. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Eugene O'Neill, Floyd Dell, Louise Bryant and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Cook moved to Greece where he died in 1926. The following year Susan Glaspell published The Road to the Temple (1927), an account of her life with Cook.

 

 

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(1) Floyd Dell, Homecoming, (1933)

A society of freethinkers was to be formed in Davenport. I was invited to the first meeting, and there I saw George Cook, the novelist. Our common enthusiasm for Haeckel's philosophy enabled us to become friends.

This immediate and deep friendship took me out to George's farm at every opportunity. In our discussions he was converted from his Nietzschean-aristocratic-anarchist philosophy to Socialism.

Truck-farming was a part of George's theory of the artistic life; the idea was the writer should not be economically dependent upon his writing, but should remain free to write what he chose.


(2) In his autobiography Homecoming, Floyd Dell wrote about how George Gig Cook met Susan Glaspell in 1903.

George and I called upon Susan Glaspell, a young newspaperwoman who began a brilliant career as a novelist. She read us some of her just-finished novel, The Glory of the Conquered, the liveliness and humour of which we admired greatly, though George deplored to me on the way home the lamentable conventionality of the author's views of life. Susan was a slight, gentle, sweet, whimsically humourous girl, a little ethereal in appearance, but evidently a person of great energy, and brimful of talent; but, we agreed, too medieval-romantic in her views of life.


(3) Floyd Dell, Homecoming, (1933)

In Provincetown in 1915 he (George Cook) found an unknown young playwright, Eugene O'Neill, whose little one-act plays were superb and beautiful romanticizations and glorifications and justifications of failure. And now George's life had what it needed; his life was henceforth lived under the aegis of Eugene O'Neill's plays, which is dreamed of bringing to the Village and producing there.

In (1926) George Cook had come to a crisis in his life; he was spiritually centered in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and now the young playwright had decided to deal directly with Broadway, refusing to allow the Provincetown Players to put on his plays before they went uptown. This was an entirely reasonable decisions on his part, but it broke George Cook's heart. In February, the Provincetown Theatre suspended operations, and a month later, George Cook and Susan Glaspell sailed for Greece.


(4) Floyd Dell wrote about Susan Glaspell and George Gig Cook in 1961.

My friend George Cook died in Greece in 1926. I had heard that he got with the shepherds, and was adored by them. Susan Glaspell has told the story of those days with great sympathy in The Road to the Temple. Susan Glaspell has said in her book that she has sometimes thought I would write a book about George. He was too close to me to be just to him. I loved him, and I would have had his life and death other than they were. I would have him die for Russia and the future, rather than Greece and the past. And if I wrote a book about George, that is what I should wish him to do.

 

 

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