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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. What comes readily to mind are the portrayals of socially marginal figures as the essential Americans, the flight-and-rescue situations, the common theme of male bonding, and the reliance on “sub-literary” myths, popular culture, and regional color in the narrative.

Twain’s effort to break the hold of romanticism through his attack on Cooper fell victim itself to changing literary and social fashions. Some critics, who agreed with him in seeing inflated diction and technical flaws in Cooper’s writing, nonetheless assailed Twain for being virulently anti—Native American.4 Others took note of Twain’s own borrowings of Cooper’s plot devices. In a point-by-point rebuttal, Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist demolished most of Twain’s main contentions.5 The charge of the hundreds of errors in random pages could not be substantiated because Twain never gave page numbers or any indication of the edition of Cooper’s novel he claimed to be using. It was notoriously difficult in Cooper’s time to avoid compositional errors, and Cooper always made numerous changes in his manuscripts. Twain’s ridicule of Cooper’s ark in The Deerslayer was based on his own assumptions of the size of a canal boat in his own era, not on Cooper’s assumptions in an era when such boats were smaller. Twain’s satire is best viewed as fiction rather than as criticism—a companion piece, perhaps, to A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

If Twain’s version of Cooper is now seen as hyperbolic and a caricature, what place do we assign to Cooper in the American literary canon? What do Cooper’s works offer to the contemporary reader? By what critical standards can we assess so varied a corpus of literary works? Is Cooper’s major interest and contribution to be viewed more usefully in the light of his broader role in nation building and cultural development in the early republic than in the strictly literary merits of his novels? And what is Cooper’s relationship to his own time and to his country, this man who seemed to his contemporaries, as he seems to us now, so complex and contradictory?

To approach such questions, we must first look at Cooper’s life. James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789. the fifth and youngest son and the twelfth of thirteen children of William and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper.6 The family moved in the next year to Cooperstown in upstate New York, the town that had been founded by William Cooper in 1786 and named for him. William Cooper made a fortune in land speculation by acquiring the rights to a 40,000-acre land grant (known as the Croghan Patent) that adjoined Lake Otsego. Cooper became the first judge for the Court of Common Pleas for Otsego County. In 1795 and 1799 he was elected to Congress. Throughout the 1790s he was a formidable figure in Federalist politics in New York State, and was virtually the political boss of the western counties of the state. 7

Judge Cooper, however, made a series of critical mistakes at the end of the decade in fighting his political adversaries, and these mistakes led to his retirement from politics and also contributed to the dramatic reversal of the Federalists’ fortunes in New York State.