Background
Ebenezer Cooke was born about 1670 in London, England. He was the son of Andrew Cook of London, who married Anne Bowyer in 1665. A marshaling of known fact and circumstance, however, seems to indicate the identity of the poet with the Ebenezer Cook who, jointly with Anna, his sister, inherited (1711) from his father Andrew Cook, of London, Gentleman, two houses in that city and an estate called "Cooke Poynt" in Dorchester County, Maryland. This Ebenezer, who sold his Maryland inheritance in 1717, was in all likelihood the individual of that name who is found later (1721 - 23) acting as deputy receiver-general in Cecil County, Maryland, and who in 1728 was admitted to practise as an attorney in Prince George's County.
Education
Ebenezer attended Cambridge University.
Career
Nothing is known of publications of his authorship, until the Maryland Gazette of December 24, 1728, printed over his name "An Elegy on the Death of the Honourable Nicholas Lowe, Esq. " There is reason to believe that a second edition of The Sot-weed Factor may have been published at Annapolis in the same year.
In 1730 a long poem by "E. C. Gent" was published at Annapolis with the title, Sotweed Redivivus: or the Planters Looking-Glass, and in 1731 came from the same place, by "E. Cooke, Gent. ," the most ambitious of the Cooke publications, The Maryland Muse. Containing I. The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. II. The Sotweed Factor. The Third Edition. These Maryland publications were important elements in the literary activity sustained in Annapolis and Williamsburg (1726 - 50) through the presses of William Parks. The writing in 1732 of two other elegies, not printed until recent times, marks the last recorded activity of Ebenezer Cooke in any field. Relating vindictively the experience of a deluded and cheated young tobacco factor, The Sot-weed Factor is made effective and of enduring interest by its author's savage wit and his gift of portraying human types, individuals, and background. In the Sotweed Redivivus, completely misunderstood by Moses Coit Tyler, satire gives place to a serious attempt at improving economic conditions in the province through a discussion of tobacco legislation, currency problems, forest depletion, and the diversification of crops.
Returning to the earlier manner in the long poem on Bacon's Rebellion, Cooke gives his readers a splendid bit of story-telling. It is one of the earliest historical poems in the American literary tradition and a piece of writing which for its gusto and lively movement may be unashamedly enjoyed once its coarse mockery of Bacon and its callousness are discounted. In general Cooke's well-constructed narrative poems are characterized by rude satire, expressed in a racy, vigorous, and homely idiom. The picture of Maryland in the early eighteenth century presented in The Sot-weed Factor and the Sotweed Redivivus carries the conviction of validity, though the critical reader takes into account, in the first of them especially, the bitter spirit which led to exaggeration and overemphasis.
