The Sot-Weed Factor was published by Doubleday in 1960, and it is one of the great comic novels in the English language — an 800-page picaresque that parodies, celebrates, and reinvents the eighteenth-century novel while telling an original story of astonishing complexity and vitality. The protagonist is Ebenezer Cooke, a naive and pompous would-be poet who sets out from England to claim his estate in colonial Maryland and is systematically stripped of every illusion, every possession, and every certainty he holds dear.
The historical Ebenezer Cooke published a satirical poem called “The Sot-Weed Factor” in 1708; Barth takes this slender fact and constructs around it a vast fictional edifice that involves pirates, prostitutes, Indians, conspiracies, mistaken identities, lost manuscripts, philosophical disputations, and sexual adventures of escalating outrageousness. The prose style mimics the eighteenth-century novel with perfect accuracy — the long sentences, the chapter summaries, the authorial asides — while maintaining a contemporary ironic awareness that the style is performance rather than natural expression.
The novel’s philosophical content is serious beneath the comedy: it asks whether innocence is possible in a fallen world, whether identity is fixed or fluid, whether history is knowable or merely narratable, and whether the act of writing can redeem the chaos of experience. These questions are explored not through abstraction but through an inexhaustible narrative inventiveness that makes the novel’s 800 pages feel not excessive but necessary.
Collecting The Sot-Weed Factor
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1960): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- Revised edition (1967): $20–$50