Ebenezer Cooke (poet)

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.

[3] "The Sot-Weed Factor" was reprinted in 1865 by Brantz Mayer, who called "the adventures and manners described ludicrous and certainly very unpolished".

[5] One of Cooke's admirers was Moses Coit Tyler, who praised "The Sot-Weed Factor" in his History of American Literature (1878), saying it struck "a vein of genuine and powerful satire"; Tyler cited a few dozen lines from the poem, and added that "Sot-Weed Redivivus" lacks the first poem's wit.

[7] Written in Hudibrastic couplets, the poem is, on its surface, a scathing Juvenalian satire of America and its colonists, and a parody of the pamphlets that advertised colonization as easy and lucrative (38, 40).

He is shocked by the brutishness of Native Americans and English settlers alike, and he is swindled by an "ambodexter quack", or corrupt lawyer.