The Sot-weed Factor - Hardcover

Barth, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436033712 ISBN 13: 9780436033711

Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1961

Synopsis

Recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business. The book is a tribute to the most insidious human vices and a hilarious ride through 18th century in the company of heroes, villans, innocents and rogues.

About this title

Book Description:

A paperback reissue of John Barth's masterpiece from the 1960s - 'a bareknuckled satire of humanity at large' (New York Times Book Review)

From the Back Cover:

In this boisterous satire on the historical novel, the hapless, naive Ebeneezer Cooke is sent from England to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business. But instead of the cultivated Eden he has been led to expect, he finds the Maryland plantation to be a barbarous and pestilential place where the Indians stink of bear grease, the colonials are drunkards and the women are sluttish. With a dazzling display of invention and unfailing wit, John Barth takes us on a wildly chaotic journey of innocence and experience through an eighteenth century that never was.

“One thing about Mr Barth's gargantuan novel can be cleared up right away. A sot-weed factor is, in eighteenth-century America, the manager of a tobacco plantation. The reader is advised to cling to this solid fact, because nothing else in Mr Barth's monstrous tome is what it appears to be, not only on the surface but also several layers below. A most magnificent, tongue-in-cheek, totally scandalous romp, reeking with vice, blasphemy and every kind of scurrility known to man.”
SUNDAY TIMES

“'The Sot-Weed Factor' is that rare literary creation – a genuine serious comedy. Ebeneezer Cooke, in this boisterous historical farce, emerges as one of the most diverting heroes to roam the world since Candide.”
TIME

“Brilliant... as it were, a lost novel by Defoe or Smollett which recreates with a remarkable air of verisimilitude a whole lost world. Exceedingly enjoyable.”
NEW STATESTMAN

“A mightily-hewn boulder of a novel among the smoother pebbles of contemporary fiction. A tour de force.”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

About this edition

• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
• Publication date: 1961
• ISBN 10: 0436033712
• ISBN 13: 9780436033711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 808