Ebenezer Cook (or Cooke) is the best American writer of satire before Benjamin Franklin, and even Franklin, it is arguable, did not produce any single piece better than The Sot-Weed Factor ... (1708). In this poem and in "The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia," both composed in the hudibrastic verse form popularized by Samuel Butler, Cook initiated a tradition of Southern humor that eventually spawned Mark Twain and William Faulkner and that remains vitally alive today. His portraits of what he called the "planting rabble" of Maryland, his deflation of the contradictory American dreams of pastoral innocence and unlimited economic advancement, and his irreverent handling and comic mythologizing of history are also very much in the mainstream of American literary traditions and entitle him to more careful critical attention than he has hitherto received.

Little is known of Cook's life. The son of Andrew and Anne Bowyer...