The sot-weed factor.著者John Barth

The Sot-weed Factor (1960) is 1973 National Book Award for Fiction winner John Barth's third novel. The comical novel follows life and career of Ebenezer Cooke, the poet laureate of Maryland. The book is an accomplished pastiche of the eighteenth-century novel, which blends fact and fiction into a dizzying meditation on the relationship between history, imagination, and the nature of storytelling.


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From John Barth Information Center
This is truly the novel that turned Barth’s career around. Those not interested in reading Barth’s complete canon should start here. The Sot-Weed Factor is one of the landmark works of Fabulism and Postmodernism, not to mention a screamingly funny book.

An imaginative romp through early colonial Maryland with a (partially) fictitious poet named Ebenezer Cooke, Sot-Weed Factor (which means “tobacco salesman”) introduces Barth’s penchant for fancy wordplay, ontological tricks, historical parody, and existential games. There are echoes of Joseph Campbell’s mythical hero track here, though Barth would later claim that this was not intentional.

Barth released a revised version of the book in 1967, shaving off some 50 pages of what he considered extraneous material.

The jacket of the original hardcover edition of Sot-Weed was done by none other than the late, great Edward Gorey of New Yorker fame. (A small picture of the jacket is at the top of the lefthand column on this page. Click for a larger version.)