Asher Sisneros

Asher K. Sisneros

Dr. Gary North

American Literature 

January 2, 2025

Mark Twain wrote a scathing review of his contemporary James Fenimore  Cooper, Cooper’s Literary Offenses. Both were 19th-century American fictional authors, but Twain thought Cooper was an embarrassment to the literary profession and said he broke 114/115 rules of good literature in his novel, The Deerslayer.¹ Where other literary critics praised Cooper for his Leatherstocking saga, Twain puked uncontrollably. 

Was Twain somewhat melodramatic in his review? Yes. Of course! That is what makes Mark Twain legendary. For one, he said authors of Romantic literature should “make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate,” but “the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.” Obviously, that was not meant to be literal. Twain was being hyperbolic. Another example is when he said, “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.”² In both of these instances, Twain is exaggerating. But he exaggerates to make a remarkably good point, and the only reason his hyperbole works is because it is intermixed with so much truth. 

For one, Twain said plots must have a direction, and the characters need a goal or conflict to resolve. However, The Deerslayer’s plot is shrouded in ambiguity. After thinking about this subject for a long time, the closest plot goals are “Hurry” Harry’s desire to win Judith Hetter, and Deerslayer’s desire to kill someone. But neither of these potential plot-carrying goals is fully realized because readers would be hard-pressed to list those off the top of their heads after reading the novel. Instead, they would just sit there in bumfuzzlement as they wondered what Cooper’s point was—because the plot is never explicitly stated or even heavily implied. Instead of crafting a plot, Cooper spent more of his time giving tedious, superfluous, and want-to-be poetic explanations of the natural scenery. 

Speaking of which, Twain also said authors should write in common vernacular. People should understand their writing intuitively, without extra brain-flexing. When writers employ ornate and flowery language, using complex sentences with obscure words, they write more for themselves than for the reader. Ultimately, literature should be used as a mode of persuasion. Ideas are conveyed to the reader through essays and books, as the writer hopes to convince the reader about something. Even fictional writers do this, as their underlying worldview is reflected in the characters’ motives and events in the book. For Cooper, it was that nature is blissful and inherently moral. But for any author to effectively persuade his readers, he must write for the masses. Behold, the poetry of Cooper: 

The spot was very lovely, of a truth, and it was then seen in one of its most favorable moments, the surface of the lake being as smooth as glass and as limpid as pure air, throwing back the mountains, clothed in dark pines, along the whole of its eastern boundary, the points thrusting forward their trees even to nearly horizontal lines, while the bays were seen glittering through an occasional arch beneath, left by a vault fretted with branches and leaves. It was the air of deep repose—the solitudes, that spoke of scenes and forests untouched by the hands of man—the reign of nature, in a word, that gave so much pure delight to one of his habits and turn of mind.³

Although Cooper writes far less pompously than Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, Twain thought he failed to employ “a simple and straightforward style.”⁴ Twain was right. 

Finally, Mark Twain also said that when a character “talks like an illustrated” intellectual “at the beginning of the paragraph, he shall talk like a negro minstrel at the end of it.”⁵ Unfortunately, Cooper routinely changed the vocabulary and style of his characters throughout The Deerslayer. One minute, they would speak very intricately like a scholar; the next, they would use slang and talk like a country rube. It does not make any sense. Characters should talk consistently, and if they talk differently, there should be a reason for it. For example, it would be acceptable for a thriller writer to make his spy character talk differently in different settings. But there is no apparent reason for Cooper to change the dialect of Deerslayer and “Hurry” Harry when they are talking privately to each other. The phenomenon is the result of sloppy writing. 

To conclude, Mark Twain was not a fan of James Fenimore Cooper’s writing. He thought the Deerslayer had a sloppy plot; had pompous language, and was not written for the layman; and the characters changed their dialect needlessly. There were even more criticisms in Cooper’s Literary Offenses, but those were the most substantive. And in those ways, Twain was correct. Cooper’s writing sucked.

1. Mark Twain, Cooper’s Literary Offenses, web. https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/Twain-Cooper.pdf, p. 1 ↩︎
2.  Ibid, p. 3 ↩︎
3.  James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, web. https://ronpaulcurriculum.com/Cooper-Deerslayer.pdf, p. 26 ↩︎
4.  Ibid, p. 3 ↩︎
5. Ibid, p. 2 ↩︎