Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is an essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire of literary criticism and as a critique of the writings of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that appeared in the July 1895 issue of North American Review. It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.
The essay is characteristic of Twain's biting, derisive, and highly satirical style of literary criticism, a form he also used to deride such authors as Oliver Goldsmith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Summary
Twain begins by quoting a few critics who praise the works of Cooper: Brander Matthews, Thomas Lounsbury, and Wilkie Collins. He then claims that they have never read the novels themselves, and that Cooper's work is seriously flawed:He goes on to list 18 separate literary rules he feels that Cooper does not follow, such as "The tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air" and "The author shall use the right word, not its second cousin." Twain continues on with few positive things to say about Cooper's writing, citing several examples from Cooper's writing to illustrate the unbelievable excess of the style and Cooper's careless approach to literary craft. Twain's analysis was foreshadowed seven decades earlier by John Neal's critique of Cooper in American Writers.
Reception
Everett Emerson wrote that the essay is "possibly the author's funniest". Joseph Andriano, in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, argued that Twain "Imposed the standards of Realism on Romance" and that this incongruity is a major source of the humor in the essay.Perhaps inevitably, Twain's essay has been criticized by proponents of Cooper as unfair and distorted. Cooper scholars Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist write, "Twain's deliberate misreading of Cooper has been devastating....Twain valued economy of style, but such concision simply was not characteristic of many early nineteenth-century novelists' work."
Similarly, John McWilliams comments:
Literary scholar Sydney J. Krause, while agreeing that the "sulfurous grumblings over Cooper hardly the work of a judicious person," sees Twain's satire as an attack on Romanticism in general and a formal announcement that Romantic literature "was a literary dead letter in post-Civil War America."