Luke Rhinehart

Luke Rhinehart was the pen name of the author George Cockcroft. He was born in the United States, the 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 Ph.D. in psychology, also from Columbia. He married his wife, Ann, on June 30, 1956. He has three children. After obtaining his Ph.D., he went into teaching. During his years as a university teacher, he taught, among other things, courses in Zen and Western literature. 

He first floated the idea of living according to the casting of dice in a lecture. The reaction was reported of equal parts intrigue and disgust, and it was at this point he realized it could become a novel. Cockcroft began experimenting with dice a long time before writing The Dice Man, but this made progress in the novel rather slow. In 1971, London-based publisher, Talmy Franklin, published The Dice Man, Cockcroft's first novel as Luke Rhinehart. Soon afterward, Cockcroft 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, 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 in Canaan, New York. On 1 August 2012, at the age of 80, Cockcroft arranged for his own death to be announced as a joke. Cockcroft passed away (for real) at the age of 87 on November 6. 2020.