Cook wrote: "I was born and raised in
Davenport, Iowa, where my family was one of the town's oldest and most wealthy. My father, a corporate lawyer, strongly encouraged my education from a young age, while my mother instilled in me a passion for culture and the arts. I completed my bachelor's degree at
Harvard in 1893." He continued his studies in Europe at the
University of Heidelberg in 1894 and at the
University of Geneva the following year. Upon completing these studies, Cook returned to Iowa. He taught English literature and classics at the
University of Iowa from 1895 until 1899. He also taught an early creative writing course, which he called "Verse Making". During the 1902 academic year, Cook was an English professor at
Stanford University. It was not until the 1950s that
Paul Engle is credited with developing what is considered the world's first creative writing program, the
Iowa Writer's Workshop, which has gained renown. In Davenport, Cook associated with other young writers in what was informally referred to as the
Davenport group. Among them was writer
Susan Glaspell. He divorced his second wife, Molly Price, with whom he had two children Nilla (b. 1908) and Harlan "Harl" (b. 1910) and he and Glaspell married in 1913. To escape community gossip and seek larger world for their work, the couple moved to New York City, where they lived in
Greenwich Village. In the summer of 1915 they went to
Provincetown, Massachusetts for the season, as did many other writers and artists from the Village. Cook was among the founders of the
Provincetown Players that year, an important step in the development of American
theatre. The group would perform works by Cook and Glaspell, as well as the first plays of
Eugene O'Neill and
Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others. Cook would lead the Provincetown Players until 1919, at which time he took a sabbatical. Although he returned to the group in 1920, internal wrangling and his own frustration led to his effectively abandoning the cooperative. ==Later years==