Cooper’s friend George Bancroft, the distinguished Harvard historian, interpreted the American Revolution in terms similar to the story lines and subtexts of Cooper’s novels dealing with the revolution, and he patterned his style of narrative history writing after Cooper’s narrative techniques. Moreover, Cooper did much to fashion and to expand the popular audience for his novels (and for the writers who followed him).1 His works were issued and reissued after his death.

The decline in Cooper’s literary reputation in America can be dated, ironically, from one such reissue of Cooper’s works; for it gave rise to the satirical 1895 Mark Twain assault on Cooper as a stylist and novelist, which was published in the North American Review under the title “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (the Appendix to this edition reprints Twain’s essay). Fulsome tributes from Professor Thomas Lounsbury of Yale and Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia had accompanied the publication of the handsome new edition (the 1895-1896 Mohawk edition) of Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. This was too much for Mark Twain, and apparently helped to precipitate his famous critical assault on Cooper. There were, said Twain, “some people who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they’re all dead now.” And further: “Now I feel deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English in The Deerslayer is the very worst that even he ever wrote.”

Twain cited, with brilliant invective, a catalogue of Cooper’s of fenses, which to Twain included such matters as inflated diction, grammatical errors, inconsistencies, ridiculous feats of marksmanship displayed by his characters, unnatural dialogue, and habitual violations of eighteen out of nineteen rules for effective fiction. Twain claimed to have found 13 0 solecisms and misuses of words in a random perusal of The Deerslayer, a total lack of plot that in the end “accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air,” and wooden characters who do not develop. Twain makes particular fun of the portrayal in chapter IV of The Deerslayer of six incompetent Indians. While trying to attack Deerslayer and his companions riding in a slow-moving ark, they misjudge the jump from the tree branch and end up in the water as the ark sails away The reader is invited to peruse Twain’s parody, which we include as an appendix to the present edition.

As an example of satire, Twain’s essay is a masterpiece. But was the indictment in the comic tour de force actually fair and on target? Hardly. Twain, for one thing, had a notorious contempt for Native Americans; he considered that Cooper was responsible for presenting a falsely benevolent picture of the Indians.2 Remember also that Twain disliked Jane Austen’s novels, never read George Eliot, and could not abide Henry James. Though a few contemporary protests were leveled against Twain, he undeniably carried the day with his attack. The conventional wisdom among the literati and the scholars shifted to the view that Cooper was a fossil and that his writings were unreadable relics. Twain’s version of Cooper began to replace the historical figure and to alter the country’s collective memory of the acclaimed writer and literary icon. Twain’s myth of Cooper became for many years more widely read than Cooper’s own writings.

Part of the difficulty of defending Cooper is that his works are so many and so varied. He did not write a single great book that stands out like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Melville’s Moby-Dick; rather, he wrote many good books—more than any nineteenth-century American writer until Henry James. Cooper’s oeuvre consists of thirty-two mostly long novels and some dozen or more volumes of social criticism, none of which can be conveniently anthologized in short selections. Twain’s lively satire, on the other hand, lends itself to easy inclusion in college syllabi, and makes for lively classroom discussion. For Cooper, a man who dealt in romances, and whose own life and family history abound in legends, it is not surprising that his life should have become cocooned in a myth—in this case, unfortunately, a critic’s hostile myth.

In fact, Twain’s brilliant vitriol was exceedingly unfair and was a gross caricature of Cooper. That “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Of fenses” played so well requires explanation. The satire’s success, I think, was in part due to shifts in literary fashion and to the emergence of American literature from an earlier stage of strong cultural nationalism. By the late nineteenth century “realism” had come of age. The American novel was no longer monopolized by a uniquely American Gothic or romantic style. These forms, notably represented in the works of Brockton Brown, Poe, Irving, Cooper himself, and in some ways Hawthorne and Melville, were no longer the only or even the dominant forms of novelistic expression. New modes of writing and shifts in the tastes of the reading public and of critics were beginning to emerge. Hawthorne and Melville struck out in new directions, and such others as Lippard, Stowe, James, Howells, Twain, Norris, and Crane emerged as writers who were generally viewed or viewed themselves as realists rather than as romantics. The American literary canon became broader, or perhaps “looser” and more encompassing. 3 There was no longer a need for an American literary exceptionalism, for American fiction to be caught up in the drive to achieve cultural independence from Europe.

The idea of a democratic art had been part of Cooper’s appeal to his countrymen, and some literary circles in Europe had heralded Cooper for paving the way to a new form of nonaristocratic art. Although Twain and the realists no doubt felt a need to rebel against what they saw as outmoded, we should perhaps not make too much of this sort of “anxiety of influence,” nor discern an inexorable Zeitgeist at work moving literature along some evolutionary path toward “higher” forms of expression. Twain, broke after the failure of his latest money-making scheme, could simply have wanted, for the fun of it, to drive another nail into the coffin of the “romancers.” Cooper was the ideal target for that purpose. Of course, nothing could disguise the fact that Twain and others incorporated many of Cooper’s techniques and plot devices into their own work.