George Whitfield Cook III was born on April 9, 1909 in Montclair, New Jersey, the son of engineer George Whitfield Cook Jr., and his wife, the former Hortense Heyse. He began writing short stories as a child and later cited Walter de la Mare and Virginia Woolf as major influences. He attended and graduated from the Yale School of Drama.
Cook began his career as a writer in the late thirties with stories in The American Mercury, Story and Cosmopolitan. One of these stories, "The Unfaithful," won an O. Henry Award in the "Best First-Published" category in 1943.
In the early forties, Cook wrote a series of stories for Redbook about a precocious teenage girl named Violet who helps to untangle her father's love life. In 1944 he dramatized these in a play called Violet. The play, which Cook also directed, only ran on Broadway for 23 performances, but it starred Patricia Hitchcock as Violet, and brought Cook to the attention of her father, Alfred Hitchcock.

Return to Whitfield Cook Autograph Profile