He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and is the author of a biography of the critic Alfred Kazin.
[1] He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Cook's Alfred Kazin: A Biography is a 2008 life of the Jewish American literary critic.
[1] William Grimes felt that Cook's biography was excessively fair-minded, bending over backwards to give the frequently unpleasant Kazin the benefit of the doubt in most cases, despite criticising Kazin for his treatment of women.
Grimes felt the book suffered from the fact that Kazin's life largely comprised minutiae of book reviewing, temporary employment, grant applications, and academic conferences.