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colonials are drunken, brawling, illiterate sharpsters whose hospitality is not to be trusted; the women are bawds and fishwives; and the courts of law are prevailingly corrupt. Among other misfortunes, the poor greenhorn is robbed of his clothes, treed by hound dogs, plagued by mosquitoes and by the “seasoning” fever so often fatal to new arrivals, and ultimately cheated out of his stock in trade. A ruined man, he takes ship homeward
from what he calls “that Shore where no good Sense is found, / But Conversation’s lost, and Manners drown’d,” and the poem closes with his malediction:
    May Wrath divine . . . lay these Regions wast
Where no Man’s faithful, nor a Woman chast!
    So much for everyday life in early-colonial Maryland. Cooke’s poem is of course a satire, programmatically hyperbolical for comic effect like most satires; and it is to be noted that unlike its antihero, the poem’s author (about whom not a great deal is known) evidently chose to live out his life over here instead of back in London, where the first edition of the poem was published. 4 But like any good satire, Cooke’s “Sot-Weed Factor” overstates for corrective purposes what our sense of reality tells us must have been overstatements in the other direction by the existing literature, which has the air of a sales prospectus. In any case, having been born and raised on the Choptank River just a few miles upstream from Cooks Point (named for Ebenezer’s father, who established a seat there in the 1660s), I knew the name and the geography long before I knew anything of its history. During my student days at Johns Hopkins I came across the Sot-Weed Factor poem in Roy Harvey Pearce’s 1950 anthology of colonial American writing, and later in my literary apprenticeship it occurred to me to imagine a novel premised on the notion that Cooke’s poem was more or less autobiographical: the misadventures of a programmatically innocent aspiring writer , precociously commissioned by Lord Baltimore to go sing the praises of life in early colonial Maryland—“the Graciousness of Maryland’s Inhabitants, Their Good Breeding and Excellent Dwelling-places, the Majesty of Her Laws, the Comfort of Her Inns & Ordinaries, &t &t”—in a word, a
Marylandiad . In my version, Cooke’s misdirections and innocent pretensions cost him not only his goods but the family estate. While then regaining that lost estate at the sacrifice of his ever more technical innocence, he also learns the hard way some facts of literary life; under all his rhetorical posturing and attitudinizing he finds an authentic voice and discovers his true subject matter and most congenial form. In short, by writing not the fulsome Marylandiad commissioned by his patron but the satirical Sot-Weed Factor instead, he manages to become the writer that he had innocently presumed himself to be.
    The same went, needless to say, for the author of the novel—officially certified as a Master of Arts well before I had attained any mastery of the art I aspired to. Even in 1956, with two novels under my belt, I innocently presumed that since I had knocked them off in about six months each, this larger and very different project might take me as long as . . . two years, maybe? In fact it took four, and my only subsequent venture into historical fiction, two decades later—a huge, intricate novel called LETTERS , having to do with our War of 1812—took seven years. Never again. It is one thing, I soon discovered, to decide to write a satirical 20th-century novel based on a satirical early-18th-century poem about colonial America, and quite another thing to learn enough about the facts of life back then to bring the thing off. In a comic novel, obviously—especially in a satirical farce—one has more license for anachronism than one would have in a straightforward historical novel or a period romance, such as those I