Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper (born January 10, 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist.

Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.

Cooper was born in Pasadena, California and raised in Arcadia, the son of Clifford Cooper, a self-made businessman who was one of the early designers of parts for uncrewed space expeditions.

His parents were politically conservative, with his father acting as an advisor to several presidents, including Richard Nixon, with whom he cultivated a close friendship.

One of his brothers, Richard, was named after Nixon.

Cooper's parents divorced when he was in his early teens.

In 1976, Cooper moved to London for a brief period.

Cooper started Little Caesar Magazine in 1976; the punk zine, which ran for 12 issues between 1976 and 1982, featured multimedia contributions from Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Debbie Harry, Bob Flanagan, and Toby Ross.

In 1978, he started Little Caesar Press, which would go on to help establish artists such as Amy Gerstler, Peter Schjeldahl, and Elaine Equi.

Cooper published his first book of poetry, Idols, in 1979 and his second, Tenderness of the Wolves, in 1981.

Tenderness of Wolves was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize the same year.

In 1979, he began working as the Director of Programming at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, where he continued to produce Little Caesar Magazine.

He held this position until 1983, when he moved to New York City.

Shortly after, he published his first novella, Safe, and became serious about writing the five-book series he had been planning since he was fifteen.

He left New York in 1985 to follow a boyfriend to Amsterdam, where he finished Closer, the first book in the George Miles Cycle and Cooper's first novel.

To get into the right headspace to write Closer, Cooper regularly took meth.

The book later won the very first Ferro-Grumley Award for gay literature.

During this time, he supported himself financially by writing for American magazines such as The Advocate, Art in America, and Artforum, the latter eventually taking him on as a regular.

Cooper returned to New York in 1987, where he worked on Frisk and several projects including co-curating an exhibit with Richard Hawkins entitled AGAINST NATURE: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men, which was open at the LACE in 1988.

He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted."

Cooper returned to Los Angeles in 1990 and continued collaborating with other artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others.

He also started the Little House on the Bowery curated imprint, which included works from Travis Jeppesen, Richard Hell, James Greer, Trinie Dalton, Derek McCormack, and others, under the independent publisher Akashic Books.

In the 1990s, he wrote for Spin and published Period, the last book in the George Miles Cycle, in 2000.

Since living in France, Cooper has published a number of novels, had a cameo in Christophe Honoré's Homme au Bain, released a book/CD collaboration with Gisèle Vienne and Peter Rehberg, reissued the graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged he released with Keith Mayerson in 1997, and curated part of the 2012 Un Nouveau Festival with Gisèle Vienne.

Cooper moved to Paris in 2005 and has collaborated with French theater director Gisèle Vienne, composers Peter Rehberg and Stephen O'Malley, and the performer Jonathan Capdevielle on six works for the theater, I Apologize (2004), Un Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), Kindertotenlieder (2007), a stage adaption of his novella Jerk (2008), This Is How You Will Disappear (2010), and Last Spring, a Prequel (2011).

His novel The Sluts won the 2007 Prix Sade award in France and a Lammy.

The Weaklings was published in limited numbers by Fanzine Press in 2008 and was followed by a full-length collection The Weaklings (XL) in 2013.

Cooper attended public schools before he started attending Flintridge Preparatory School in high school; he was expelled in 11th grade.

He attended Pasadena City College and Pitzer College.

Cooper began reading French literature at 15 and was drawn to Marquis de Sade in particular for his risqué depictions of libertine sex.

He was also inspired by French novelists/directors such as Jean Cocteau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras.

Though he had started writing surreal stories at age 12, he became a more focused writer at 15 and tried to imitate the writing styles of Arthur Rimbaud and de Sade.

He began planning out a five-book series that would later become The George Miles Cycle.

Punk subculture was a major part of his twenties.

In 2012, Kunstverein Amsterdam held CLOSER: The Dennis Cooper Papers, a multimedia exhibit celebrating The George Miles Cycle.

In mid-2016, Cooper engaged in a two-month standoff with Google after it deleted his blog and Gmail accounts without warning, due to what the company described as unspecified violations of their terms of use policy.

Ten years of Cooper's writings were lost, including a novel.

Cooper termed the situation "a nightmare".

Cooper's plight attracted media attention, including from The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Le Figaro, and Die Welt.

Google's attorneys contacted Cooper and after long negotiations, returned his data.