Luke Rhinehart was the pen name of the author George Cockcroft.

He was born in the United States, son of an engineer and a civil servant. He received a BA from Cornell University and an MA from Columbia University. Subsequently he received a PhD in psychology, also from Columbia. He married his wife, Ann, on June 30, 1956. He has three children.

After obtaining his PhD, he went into teaching. During his years as a university teacher he taught, among other things, courses in Zen and Western literature. He first floated the idea of living according to the casting of dice in a lecture. The reaction was reportedly of equal parts intrigue and disgust, and it was at this point he realized it could become a novel. Cockcroft began experimenting with dice a long time before writing The Dice Man, but this made progress on the novel rather slow.

In 1971, London-based publisher, Talmy Franklin, published The Dice Man, Cockcroft's first novel as Luke Rhinehart. Soon afterwards, Cockcroft was engaged in the creation of a dice center in New York City.

In 1975, he was involved in a round-the-world voyage in a large trimaran ketch. Later, he spent some time in a sailboat in the Mediterranean, where he taught English and from there moved to a former Sufi retreat on the edge of a lake in Canaan, New York.

On 1 August 2012, at the age of 80, Cockcroft arranged for his own death to be announced, as a joke.

Cockcroft passed away (for real) at the age of 87 on November 6. 2020.