Been down so long it looks like up to me

BeenDownSoLong.jpg First edition Author Richard Fariña Country United States Language English Genre College, Humor Publisher Random House Publication date 1966-04-28 Media type Print (Paperback) Pages 269 pp ISBN 0-14-018930-0 OCLC 34666497 Dewey Decimal 813/.54 20 LC Class PS3556.A715 B4 1996 Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is a novel by Richard Fariña. First published in the United States in 1966 the novel, based largely on Fariña's college experiences and travels, is a comic picaresque story that is set in the American West, in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution, and at an upstate New York university. The name of the protagonist is Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a modern Odysseus. The book has become something of a cult classic among those who study 1960s or counterculture literature. Fariña wrote the novel while a student at Cornell University. The novel is laced with pseudonym references to Cornell University ("Mentor University"), Cornellians and Ithaca landmarks. Gnossos is a gleeful anarchist, heaving creche statuary off a bridge into one of Ithaca's famed gorges, smoking dope at fraternity parties, poking fun at the pompous, self-righteous and well-to-do, swilling Red Cap ale, retsina and martinis, while pursuing the coed in the green knee-socks and seeking karma. After a detour to Cuba during the anti-Batista revolt, Gnossos returns to "Athene" to become the inadvertent leader of the student rebellion against a university edict—this is 1958 after all—that would have banned women from men's apartments.