Howard E. Cook His professional name is Howard of Athens. Athens, Tennessee that is, where he was born and where he now lives and works. With an undergraduate double major in philosophy and comparative literature from the University of Tennessee, he went on to earn an MA in English from CCNY beforen going to Paris to pursue advanced studies in French language and literature at Schiller International University Paris. During the fabulously radical sixties he lived in Greenwich Village and did free-lance writing and copy editing for various book publisher – Macmillan, McGraw-Hill for example – as well as for TIME, Life, Fortune and Look. He lived at that time on storied Gay Street, an easy walking distance from Washington Square, where in those heady days the hippies and the folk singers gathered, where the counter-culture and sex revolutions were finding a rallying point. While doing postgraduate work at Hunter College and City College he taught English at Columbia Grammar School in Manhattan. Better pay in the New York City public school system lured him into attempting to teach English at Ben Franklin High School in Harlem – a futile undertaking. He gave up, shook the dust of Gotham from his shoes and went back home to Athens, Tennessee. He taught French and English at Calhoun High School, near his beloved Athens until that school closed, after which he taught French at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and at Hiwassee College in Monroe County. The above dust jacket was designed by the author for Swifter than Eagles: Bill White and the Battle of Athens, 1946, his non-fiction novel about an election-day shootout between returning G.I.s and a corrupt political machine in Athens. An immediate best-seller on the local scene, it quickly sold out and is now out of print. The soft-cover, revised edition, of The Weed & the Winter Solstice pictured above is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, a dedication inspired by the author's admiration of Kubrick's talent for profoundly provocative symbolism.. The complex allegorical symbolism in The Weed & the Winter Solstic, its rich ambiguities should remind the sensitive reader of Kubrick's best films, particularly of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, of which he said this: "the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded." The story is told from Mr. Byrd's point of view. Email: "Howard Edward Cook" <6212hcook@comcast.net> 423 435-8897 |
About the Author
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