Editing Luke Rhinehart (section)

==''The Dice Man''==

{{Main|The Dice Man}}
Rhinehart's famous novel ''The Dice Man'' was published in 1971 and tells the story of a [[psychiatrist]] who makes daily decisions based on the casting of [[dice]]. The cover bore the confident tagline, "Few novels can change your life. This one will"; in the United States this was altered to read, "This book will change your life".{{citation needed|date=November 2022}}

Cockcroft has described the origin of the idea for this work variously,<ref>For a more complete discussion, see the Wikipedia article, ''[[The Dice Man]]'', and references therein.</ref><ref>For an account that describes the origin of the idea in the years between Cockcroft's teens and early twenties in a [[self-help]] effort to move him away from shyness and an uptight sensibility through risk-taking, in areas such as "what to read, where to go, how to react to people," see Adams, ''[[The Guardian]]'', 27 August 2000, op. cit.</ref><ref>For an account that describes the origin of the idea in Cockcroft's college years, in as a way to decide what he and his friends would do together socially, or to decide between slightly mischievous dates, see Carrère, ''The Guardian'', 7 November 2019, op. cit.</ref><ref>For an account that describes the origin of the idea in Cockcroft at the age of 16 years, likewise in an effort to move him away, first, from procrastination, and later, from shyness, see Gold, ''The Guardian'', 4 March 2017, op. cit.</ref> and at the time of the publication of this work, "it was not clear whether the book was fiction or autobiography", because its protagonist and author were eponymous.<ref name=guardian2/><ref name=guardian3/> Curiosity over its authorship has persisted since its publication.<ref name=guardian2/><ref name=guardian3/> 

Emmanuel Carrère, writing for ''[[The Guardian]]'', presented a [[Long-form journalism|long-form]] expose on Cockcroft and the relationship between author and legend in 2019, and in following others,<ref name=guardian1/><ref name=guardian3/> established the author Cockcroft as a life-long English professor living "in an old farmhouse with a yard that slopes down to a duck pond", a husband of fifty-years, father of three, and a caregiver to a [[special needs]] child.<ref name=guardian2/><ref name=guardian1>{{cite journal | author = Gold, Tanya | date = 4 March 2017 | title = Three Days with The Dice Man: 'I Never Wrote for Money or Fame' | journal = [[The Guardian]] | url = https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/three-days-dice-man-never-wrote-money-fame-tanya-gold | access-date = 12 November 2019 | quote = The book was published in 1971, an era devoted to psychoanalysis (not the mocking of it), and it was not an instant success. But over the course of 45 years, it has become a famous book, with devoted fans. The Dice Man has sold more than 2m copies in multiple languages and is still in print... / As his notoriety grew, journalists came to interview the Dice Man. But Luke Rhinehart does not exist: he is the pseudonym of a man called George Powers Cockcroft, who shielded his real identity from his readers for many years... / As a boy, he was shy and compliant, and began to use the dice at 16. He was a procrastinator: 'So I would make a list of things to do in a day and the dice would choose which one I did first.' Then he began to use the dice 'to force myself to do things I was too shy to do. If the dice chose it, then somehow that made it possible.' / [''The Dice Man''] did badly in America, partly, Cockcroft thinks, because of a cover jacket featuring a naked woman lying on a bed. But it did better in Europe, particularly in England, Sweden, Denmark and now Spain, where it was for a time the most requested library book in Spanish universities.}}</ref><ref name=guardian3/>

''The Dice Man'' was critically well received. It quickly became,<ref name=TheTimes1/> and remains thought of as a cult classic.<ref name=telegraph1/><ref name=Fann2011/> It initially sold poorly in the United States, but well in Europe, particularly England, Sweden, Denmark, and Spain.<ref name=guardian1/> Writing in 2017 for ''The Guardian'', Tanya Gold noted that "over the course of 45 years" it was still in print, had become famous, had devoted fans, and had "sold more than 2m copies in multiple languages",<ref name=guardian1/> with as many as 27 languages and 60 countries have been claimed.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://permutedpress.com/authors/luke-rhinehart |title=Luke Rhinehart - Permuted Press |access-date=2014-12-17 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141218012410/http://permutedpress.com/authors/luke-rhinehart |archive-date=2014-12-18 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In 1995, the [[BBC]] called it "one of the fifty most influential books of the last half of the twentieth century,".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780006513919/the-search-for-the-dice-man/ |title=The Search for the Dice Man |website=Harper Collins Australia|access-date=19 November 2020}}</ref> In 1999, after one of their reporters experimented, controversially, with dicing,<ref name = guardian4>{{cite journal | author = Gibson, Janine | date = 13 June 1999 | title = Media: Dicing with Death | journal = [[The Guardian]] | url = https://www.theguardian.com/media/1999/jun/14/9 | access-date = November 22, 2019}}</ref> [[Loaded (magazine)|''Loaded'']] magazine named it "Novel of the Century".<ref>{{Cite web |date=2017-03-04 |title=Three days with The Dice Man: 'I never wrote for money or fame' |url=http://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/three-days-dice-man-never-wrote-money-fame-tanya-gold |access-date=2022-11-22 |website=The Guardian |language=en}}</ref> In 2013, Alex Clark of the ''[[Telegraph (newspaper)|Telegraph]]'' chose it as one of the fifty greatest [[cult following|cult]] books of the last hundred years.<ref name=telegraph1/>