Albert Spaulding Cook

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Albert Spaulding Cook (October 28, 1925 – July 7, 1998) was a noted American literary critic, poet, classical scholar, teacher and translator. He taught Classics, English and Comparative Literature at the

Western Reserve, the University at Buffalo and Brown University, as well as at various universities abroad.[1]

Early life

Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, Cook spent much of his early childhood in Ohio and in Massachusetts. In the late 1930s, his family moved to Albany and in 1940 settled in Utica, New York. His parents separated when he was fourteen, his mother at first remaining in Utica and later moving to New York City, and his father moving to Boston. A brother, two years his junior, pursued a career in radio.

Education

While in high school, Albert Cook ran the school's literary magazine, won an

Atlantic Monthly
student essay prize, and edited an anthology of Utica area poets. Some of his schoolmates, among them Aaron Rosen and Edwin Dolin, remained lifelong friends and collaborators; another, Carol Rubin, eventually became his wife. A gifted linguist from his earliest years, he learned Latin and taught himself Greek in high school; by the time he reached college, he was proficient also in French and German; he later added Hebrew and Russian. At the peak of his career, he spoke four languages and could read ten.

In 1943 he enrolled in

Bowdoin Prize
in Classical Greek and Latin and the John Osborne Sargent Prize for Latin Translation. He also published various poems under the pen-name of "Charles Hamilton Sorley". At his Harvard graduation in 1946, he delivered the Latin commencement oration.

Rather than proceeding immediately to graduate school, he lived for some months in poverty in the village of

Anglican
Christianity.

He returned to Harvard to complete his master's degree, chiefly under the mentorship of the renowned classicist

Eric Havelock, and continued as a Harvard Junior Fellow, envisioning an eventual career outside academe as a lone wolf writer of poetry, drama and fiction. A prominent member of a group of young Harvard writers that included L. E. Sissman, Norman Wexler and Richard Wilbur, he founded the little magazine Halcyon (1947–1948), publishing work by himself and his friends alongside contributions from Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg and E. E. Cummings. He also began working with Boston's Tributary Theater, which staged his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
. In a revised form, this version of the play was several times republished in later years. Elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, Cook continued to work on a variety of projects, and began publishing work in The Partisan Review.

He married Carol S. Rubin on June 19, 1948, and in the following spring took up residence on a Junior Fellow Study Grant in the

Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. His three sons were born in the years following his return and in 1951 the family moved to New York City. Still determined to become an independent writer and reluctant to commit to an academic career, Cook supported himself and his family by various odd jobs, from encyclopedia salesman to museum accountant, until fiscal rescue arrived once more in the form of a Fulbright
grant to France.

Career

Financial necessity finally persuaded him to accept the offer of a teaching position in the

Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By this time, his works of criticism had gained a substantial reputation; also, his first volume of verse was published by the University of Arizona Press, and several of his plays were performed by experimental theaters in Cleveland and elsewhere. Two years later he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford
.

Meanwhile, in 1963, he assumed the chairmanship of the English Department in the

Norman Holland, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Bruce Jackson, John Logan, Ann London Scott, Charles Olson
, Bill Sylvester and Dorothy Van Ghent all joined the faculty during his watch), but also to democratize the department by encouraging the breach of conventional barriers among period specialties, or between creative and scholarly, young and old, tenured and untenured, and even teachers and students. His presence was especially strong during the two sensational Buffalo Festivals of the Arts in 1965 and 1967, transpiring during a politically and ideologically explosive decade.

He also instituted a vigorous program of illustrious visitorships, usually during the summer sessions, which in the fifteen years of his tenure featured

John Coetzee, Charles Baxter, Marc Schell, Carol Jacobs, Gerald O'Grady). His reformation of the Buffalo English Department was viewed by many as the single greatest achievement of his career. However, by the late 1970s, increasingly sidelined by an unsympathetic new University administration and hampered by tightening fiscal restraints, he accepted the offer of a distinguished professorship at Brown University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. As an Emeritus, he kept energetically publishing and guest-lecturing until his sudden death of a heart attack a decade later. The Albert Spaulding Cook Prize at Brown University was established in his honor.[2]
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Cook died in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of 72.

Academic positions

Published works

Criticism and literary theory

Poetry

Drama

  • "
    Cleveland Playhouse
    , Cleveland. (See also "Translations" below.)
  • Double Exposure (full-length play): Edlred Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio 1958
  • Night Guard (one act play) broadcast by WBAI, New York and KPFA San Francisco 1962
  • Big Blow (full-length play): Chamber Theatre, Buffalo, New York 1964
  • Check (full-length play): Chamber Theatre, Buffalo, New York1966
  • Pan Is Dead (full-length play): staged reading, Playwright's Platform, Boston March 1985
  • The Death of
    Trotsky
     published in: Theatre and Drama 9:1, Fall 1970
  • Recall] announced for: Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), American Radio Plays; produced at Brown University, 1987

Translations

  • ISBN 0393964051
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex in: Ten Greek Plays (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); republished in Reading for Pleasure (Prentice-Hall, 1960); also in Oedipus Rex: A Mirror for Greek Drama (San Francisco 1963); as Oedipus Rex (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1982); and in Greek Tragedy: An Anthology (Wayne State University Press, revised ed., 1993)
  • (with Pamela Perkins) The Burden of Sufferance: Russian Women Poets (New York: Garland, 1993
    ISBN 0824033256

Compilations

References

  1. ^ a b "Albert Cook". The Reporter. 29. University at Buffalo: 35. July 23, 1998.
  2. ^ "Albert Spaulding Cook Prize in Comparative Literature". Brown University. March 21, 2013. Retrieved January 9, 2023.
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