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'''''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.
Fariña wrote the novel while a student at [[Cornell University]]. His agent, Robert Mills, began advertising it as a work-in-progress to several British publishers in 1963. It was eventually submitted to [[Random House]] and accepted by them in April 1965. Jim Silberman was the book's editor. Fariña was paid the advance fee of $5,400 for his novel and its release was announced for the autumn of 1965 but was rescheduled for the spring publishing season of April 1966. The title appears to come from a line in the 1928 blues song "[[I Will Turn Your Money Green]]," by [[Furry Lewis]],<ref>▼
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{{cite web
| title = I Will Turn Your Money Green
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