The Sot-Weed Factor (novel)

The Sot-Weed Factor
A monochrome book cover illustration. Linework is in white against a blue background. To the left, a 17th-century man with a high collar writes with a large feather quill on a large piece of paper in his right hand. To the right, a woman in period dress, arms akimbo, stares up at the man. Across the illustration, at the top, in yellow reads "John Barth"; below it, in small black writing, reads "Author of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road". Across the middle reads "The Sot-Weed Factor", again in yellow.
First edition
AuthorJohn Barth
PublisherDoubleday
Publication date
1960

The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr (1708) by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1665 – c. 1732), about whom few biographical details are known.

A satirical epic set in the 1680s–90s in London and colonial Maryland, the novel tells of a fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and commissioned to write a Marylandiad to sing the praises of the colony. He undergoes adventures on his journey to and within Maryland while striving to preserve his virginity. The complicated Tom Jones–like plot is interwoven with numerous digressions and stories-within-stories, and is written in a style patterned on the writing of 18th-century novelists such as Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett.