The sot-weed factor

Description

Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem

First Sentence

IN THE LAST YEARS of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to be the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The sot-weed factorGrosset & Dunlap1966-01-01
• sotweed factoranchor literary library1960-01-01
• The sot-weed factor.Secker & Warburg1961-01-01
• The sot-weed factorSecker & Warburg1961-01-01
• The sot-weed factorGrosset & Dunlap1964-01-01
• The sot-weed factorGrosset & Dunlap1966-01-01