Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "The Dice Man" in English language version.
It was not clear whether the book was fiction or autobiography, but its author, Luke Rhinehart, had the same name as his hero and, like him, he was a psychiatrist. According to the back cover, he lived in Majorca... 'Psychiatrist? Psychoanalyst?' George repeats, as surprised as if I had said cosmonaut. No, he was never a psychiatrist, he has been a college English teacher all his life... / Really? But on the cover of his book... / George shrugs as if to say, editors, journalists, you know, there is almost nothing they won't write... / ...[Cockroft] handles the wheel with an abruptness that contrasts with his good humour and makes his wife laugh. It is moving to see how the two love each other, and when Ann tells me in passing that they have been married for 50 years, I am not surprised. / They live in an old farmhouse with a yard that slopes down to a duck pond. They have three grown boys, two of whom live nearby. One is a carpenter and the other is a housepainter; the third still lives at home. He is schizophrenic, Ann tells me matter-of-factly; he is doing fine at the moment, but I shouldn't worry if I hear him speaking a bit loudly in his room, which is right beside the guest room where I will be staying.
Originally he had seen the dice as a way of breaking down some of the habitual stiffness he disliked in his own character: 'I was a shy, uptight sort of guy in my teens and early twenties, and tremendously driven to succeed, get A grades and so on, and I did not like either of those characteristics one bit...' / He had the notion that by rolling a dice to make decisions, about what to read, where to go, how to react to people, he could bring risk into his life, which he otherwise seemed naturally indisposed toward. In this way, he hoped, he could turn himself into someone else. / At the time, Cockcroft was... leading a seminar on freedom—Nietzsche and Sartre—and he asked his class... whether perhaps the ultimate freedom was not to 'get away from habit and causality and make all your decisions by casting dice'. His students were either so appalled or so intrigued by the idea that Cockcroft knew immediately that this was something worth writing about. / ...progress on the novel was slow, and by the time he completed it he was 37, living in Majorca with his family... It was there that, by chance, he ran into a publisher in Deya who said he would look at the book. / Some months later when the paperback rights were sold for $50,000, Cockcroft and his family were living a dice life on a sailboat in the Mediterranean. By that time, Cockcroft says, he knew that the dice were probably just a gimmick to have fun with, or to get from one place in your life to another place, 'but once you got somewhere you were happy, you'd be stupid to shake it up any further...'
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.
