(1873-1924)
Born in Davenport, Iowa, "Jig" Cook studied at the Universities of Iowa, Heidelberg, and Geneva as well as at Harvard University. He became a professor of Greek, a novelist, and most significantly, the intellectual leader of the group that became the Provincetown Players in 1915. His one-act Change Your Style was performed on Lewis Wharf in September 1915. With his third wife Susan Glaspell, whom he married in 1913, Cook wrote two one-act plays: Suppressed Desires, a satire on Freudian psychoanalysis, and Tickless Time. Cook's own plays include The Athenian Women (1918) and The Spring (1921), both full-length. Cook's idealism made him uncomfortable with commercial success, and he wrote a "Provincetown valedictory" (quoted in Sarlös 1982, 142-44). In 1922, Cook and Glaspell went to live in Greece; he died there and was buried in Delphi. Glaspell then wrote his biography, The Road to the Temple.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.