Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
Reception
Reception
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[thumbnail\|James Fenimore Cooper in an 1822 portrait](/wiki/File:James_Fenimore_Cooper_by_Jarvis.jpg "James Fenimore Cooper by Jarvis.jpg")
Everett Emerson (in *Mark Twain: A Literary Life*) 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. Online excerpt.

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 (a possible but not necessary criterion), but such concision simply was not characteristic of many early nineteenth\-century novelists' work."Schachterle \& Ljungquist, p. 410

Similarly, [John McWilliams](/wiki/John_McWilliams "John McWilliams") comments:

Literary scholar Sydney J. Krause, while agreeing that the "sulfurous grumblings over Cooper \[are] hardly the work of a judicious person," sees Twain's satire as an attack on [Romanticism](/wiki/Romanticism "Romanticism") in general and a formal announcement that Romantic literature "was a literary dead letter in post\-Civil War America."


Why were Cooper scholars critical of Twain's essay?