George Cram Cook Iowa Author and Dreamer

George Cram Cook

George Cram Cook was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1873 — which was bad timing if you planned to be a philosopher. Everyone else in Iowa was planting corn. George was planting ideas. They didn’t grow as well.

 He came from money, went to Harvard, studied Greek, and returned home like an over-educated comet. “He was too smart for his own good,” one former student said, “and knew it.” He got a job teaching English at the University of Iowa and told his students to stop writing about kings and start writing about life.

 

Cook said, “Books ought to have the smell of sweat and the dirt of the fields on them.” The dean disagreed. Iowa City wasn’t ready for a professor who quoted Nietzsche between puffs of his cigarette and told students honesty mattered more than grammar. The school quietly pushed him out. Cook called it “the first moral victory of my career.”

 

He moved to Stanford, hoping the Pacific air would cool him down. It didn’t. A student remembered his lectures as “a cross between a sermon and a tornado.” Cook spoke about the “moral duty of the artist” as if it were a religion. “Art,” he told his class, “is man’s rebellion against the stupidity of fact.” Another professor muttered, “He’s either a genius or a lunatic.” Cook didn’t mind either label.

 

George Cram Cook at typewriter

When academia lost interest in him, Cook turned to fiction. His 1903 novel Roderick Taliaferro followed a frustrated artist battling hypocrisy in the Midwest — which, in a surprise twist, looked suspiciously like George Cram Cook battling hypocrisy in Iowa. Critics were confused. The Atlantic said it was “brilliantly written and almost entirely unreadable.” Cook shrugged. “The truth wasn’t made to be convenient.”

 He doubled down with The Chasm in 1911, about a man torn between idealism and money. “I am so sick of the world’s indifference,” the hero groans. The book sold poorly but got him a cult following among radicals and dreamers. One reviewer called him “a novelist who prefers preaching to pleasing.”

 

Cook’s life changed when he met Susan Glaspell, a journalist and fiction writer from Davenport who’d made her name covering murder trials and writing sharp stories about women’s lives. She said Cook had “a restlessness that could not be housed in one man.” They fell into love like two sparks landing in a gasoline can.

 

Together, they headed to Greenwich Village in New York, where the coffee was cheap, the politics were loud, and every poet had an opinion about socialism. Cook grew a beard, wore sandals, and gave impromptu lectures on “spiritual democracy” in cafes. “He made you believe,” Glaspell said, “that art might actually save the world.”

 

In 1915, Cook and Glaspell moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts. They rented a shack by the sea and staged plays for fun. The floorboards were uneven, the audience sat on borrowed chairs, and the first performance nearly burned the place down. They called themselves the Provincetown Players.

 

The plays were rough but alive. Glaspell’s Trifles, based on a real Iowa murder, premiered there. Cook encouraged a nervous young playwright named Eugene O’Neill to bring in a one-act play called Bound East for Cardiff. It was moody, grim, and real. Cook read it, looked up, and said, “You’ve got salt in your blood. Keep it there.”

 

George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell
in Greece

A Boston critic wrote that the Provincetown Players “smell of salt, fish, and human truth.” Another sneered that their plays were “raw, amateurish, and not fit for civilized audiences.” Cook smiled at that review. “Civilization,” he told friends, “is precisely what we’re trying to avoid.”

 To Cook, theater wasn’t entertainment — it was revolt. “We are trying,” he said, “to make life itself walk upon the stage.” He hated Broadway’s polish and believed art should make people uncomfortable. “If you’re not shaking,” he told one actor, “you’re not telling the truth.”

 

They ran the Players like a commune — no hierarchy, no contracts, no safety nets, and it worked until it didn’t. By 1922, the group was fracturing under the pressure of fame and fatigue. Cook said, “We started as a family and ended as a company.” He and Glaspell packed up again, this time for Greece.

 

They settled in Delphi, a small village beneath Mount Parnassus, living among the ruins. Cook grew olives, read Plato, and wrote about a world where artists could live honestly, free from “the idiocy of money.” “We came to the source,” he wrote in a letter, “to remember why men ever began to sing.”

 

He dreamed of building a modern community based on art and equality — a kind of creative utopia. It never quite materialized. He spent his last years reading Homer by lamplight, writing letters no one published, and walking through olive groves that reminded him, “that beauty is older than despair.

 

In 1924, malaria caught him. He was fifty-one. Glaspell scattered his ashes on Mount Parnassus — home of the Muses. “He found his place at last,” she said, “among the poets who never stop arguing.”

 

After his death, the Boston Transcript called him “a man who built cathedrals in barns.” The New York Times said he “did not found the American theater, but he made it possible.” Eugene O’Neill called him “the best teacher I ever had, though he never thought he was teaching.”