Ebenezer Cooke (poet)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is a thoroughly fictional account of the life of real person Ebenezer Cooke, a Maryland colonist who in 1708 wrote the real satirical poem ""The Sot-Weed Factor"". Barth's Cooke is a naive innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic, becomes disillusioned and ends up writing a biting satire." --Sholem Stein |
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Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1665 – c. 1732) was an American poet. Probably born in London, he became a lawyer in Maryland, then a British colony, where he wrote a number of poems including one that some scholars consider the first American satire: "The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr" (1708). He was fictionalized by John Barth as the comically innocent protagonist of The Sot-Weed Factor, a novel in which a series of fantastic misadventures leads Cooke to write his poem.
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