—September 1841
EDGAR ALLAN POE
There are no authors, from whose works individual inaccurate sentences
may not be culled. But ... Mr. Cooper, no doubt through haste
or neglect, is remarkably and especially inaccurate, as a general rule.
—from Graham’s Magazine (November 1843)
FRANCIS PARKMAN
The Deerslayer, the first novel in the series of the Leatherstocking Tales,
seems to us one of the most interesting of Cooper’s productions. He
has chosen for the scene of his story the Otsego lake, on whose banks
he lived and died, and whose scenery he has introduced into three, if
not more, of his novels. The Deerslayer, or Leatherstocking, here
makes his first appearance as a young man, in fact scarcely emerged
from boyhood, yet with all the simplicity, candor, feeling, and penetration,
which mark his riper years. The old buccaneer in his aquatic
habitation, and the contrasted characters of his two daughters, add a
human interest to the scene, for the want of which the highest skill in
mere landscape painting cannot compensate. The character of Judith
seems to us the best drawn, and by far the most interesting, female
portrait in any of Cooper’s novels with which we are acquainted. The
story, however, is not free from the characteristic faults of its author.
Above all, it contains, in one instance at least, a glaring exhibition of
his aptitude for describing horrors. When he compels his marvellously
graphic pen to depict scenes which would disgrace the shambles or
the dissecting table, none can wonder that ladies and young clergymen
regard his pages with abhorrence. These, however, are but casual
defects in a work which bears the unmistakable impress of his genius.
—from North American Review (January 1852)
JOSEPH CONRAD
[James Fenimore Cooper] wrote before the great American language
was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches
upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely
England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence,
the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing
and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein
of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations
of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.
-from Outlook (June 4, 1898)
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Cooper is in our epoch the only author worthy of being put aside
Walter Scott: he does not equal him, but he has his genius. He owes
the high place he holds in modern literature to two faculties: that of
painting the sea and seamen; that of idealizing the magnificent landscapes
of America.... I feel for his two faculties the admiration Walter
Scott felt for them, which is still further deserved by the grandeur,
the originality of Leather-Stocking, that fine personality which binds
into one The Pioneers, The Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Prairie. LeatherStocking
is a statue, a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born of the
savage state and of civilization, who will live as long as literatures last.
I do not know that the extraordinary work of Walter Scott furnishes
a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and the
forests. Gurth in Ivanhoe approaches Leather-Stocking. We feel that if
the great Scotchman had seen America he might have created LeatherStocking
. It is, especially, by that man, half Indian, half civilized, that
Cooper has risen to the level of Walter Scott.
—translated by K. P Wormeley,
from The Personal Opinions of Honore de Balzac ( 1899)
D. H. LAWRENCE
Natty was Fenimore’s great Wish: his wish-fulfilment.... Because it
seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when
one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers
them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way,
and almost prophetic.
-from Studies in Classic American Literature ( 19 2 3 )
CARL VAN DOREN
[The Deerslayer] is the tale of Natty’s coming of age. Already a hunter,
he here kills his first man and thus enters the long career which lies
before him. That career, however, had already been traced by Cooper,
and the distress with which Deerslayer realizes that he has human
blood on his hands, becomes, in the light of his future, immensely
eloquent. It gives the figure of the man almost a new dimension; one
remembers the deaths Natty has yet to deal. In other matters he is
nearer his later self, for he starts life with a steady if simple philosophy
which, through all his many adventures, keeps him to the end
the son of nature he was at the beginning.
-from The American Novel, 1789-1939 ( 1940)
Questions
1. Who is right about “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Mark Twain or Bruce L. R. Smith, the author of this edition’s introduction?
2. Consider Deerslayer’s rejection of Judith’s proposal. Is he to be praised or blamed? Can one tell Cooper’s own position? Can Deerslayer’s motives be understood?
3. What would you say are the reasons for this novel’s once immense and still substantial popularity? Are any of its themes current?
4. The characters and setting in The Deerslayer are American, and in that sense the novel is, of course, American-as the novels of Charles Dickens are English. But is there something beyond the characters and setting-some worldview, some unconscious drive, some way of being and acting-that is particularly and exclusively American?
FOR FURTHER READING
Other Works by James Fenimore Cooper
Precaution (1820)
The Spy (1821)
The Pilot (1823)
The Pioneers (1823)
Lionel Lincoln (1825)
The Last of the Mohicans ( 1826)
The Prairie (1827)
The Red Rover (1827)
Notions of the Americans (1828)
The Wept ofWish-ton-Wish (1829)
The Water-Witch (1830)
The Bravo (1831)
The Heidenmauer (1832)
The Headsman (1833)
The Monikins (1835)
The American Democrat (1838)
Homeward Bound (1838)
Home as Found (1838)
The Pathfinder (1840)
Satanstoe (1845)
The Chainbearer (1845)
The Redskins (1846)
Bibliography and Reference
Dyer, Alan Frank. James Fenimore Cooper: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
MacDougall, Hugh C. Where Was James? A James Fenimore Cooper Chronology from 1789 to 1851. Cooperstown, NY: James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers, no. 3, second printing, January 1998.
. Cooper and Cooperstown: A Chronology and Bibliography. Cooperstown, NY: James Fenimore Cooper Society, 1999.
Spiller, Robert E., and Philip C. Blackburn. A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper. 1934. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. Bibliography of early Cooper editions.
Summerlin, Mitchell Eugene. A Dictionary to the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1987.
Walker, Warren S. Plots and Characters in the Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. Ham-den, CT: Archon Books, 19 7 8 .
Biography
Grossman, James. James Fenimore Cooper: A Biographical and Critical Study. 1949. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967.
Long, Robert Emmet. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Lounsbury, Thomas R. James Fenimore Cooper. 1883. New York: Chelsea House, 1981.
Railton, Stephen. Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Wallace, James D. Early Cooper and His Audience. New York: Columbia University Press, I986.
Letters, Correspondence, and a Memoir
Beard, James Franklin, ed. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-1968.
Cooper, James Fenimore [grandson], ed. Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922.
Cooper, Susan Fenimore [daughter]. “Small Family Memories.” In James Fenimore Cooper [grandson], ed., Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, vol. 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922, pp. 7-72.
Literary Criticism
Clark, Robert. History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Darnell, Donald. James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993.
Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper: The Novelist. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.
Franklin, Wayne. The New World of James Fenimore Cooper. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
House, Kay Seymour. Cooper’s Americans. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1965.
Kelly, William P Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Peck, H. Daniel. A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.
Philbrick, Thomas. James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Rans, Geoffrey Cooper’s Leather-stocking Novels: A Secular Reading. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Ringe, Donald A. James Fenimore Cooper. 1961. Revised edition: Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988.
Suzuki, Taisuke. The Literary World of James Fenimore Cooper: His Works and Their Relation to His Beliefs. Tokyo: Eichosa, 1992.
Literary Criticism: Collected Essays
Bakker, J., ed. James Fenimore Cooper Issue: Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 20:3 (1990). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Papers from the 1989 Bicentennial Conference on Cooper at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Clark, Robert, ed. James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays. London: Vision, and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985.
Cooper Conference Papers. Papers from the biannual conference on James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, held since 19 7 8 at the State University of New York College at Oneonta; published by the college.
Cooper Panel Papers. Papers from the Cooper Panel at the annual conference of the American Literature Association, held in San Diego and Baltimore ; published by the James Fenimore Cooper Society (Cooperstown, NY).
Dekker, George, and John P McWilliams, eds. Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Fields, Wayne, ed. James Fenimore Cooper: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
Verhoeven, W M., ed. James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1993.
Walker, Warren S., ed. Leatherstocking and the Critics. Chicago: Scott, Fores-man, 1965.
Politics and Political Views in Cooper’s writing
Adams, Charles Hansford. “The Guardian of the Law”: Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The American Democrat, or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. 1838. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
McWilliams, John E, Jr. Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper America. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1972.
Spiller, Robert E. Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times. 1931. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.
Waples, Dorothy. TheWhig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938.
William Cooper and Cooperstown
Birdsall, Ralph. The Story of Cooperstown. 1917. Cooperstown, NY: Willis Monie, 2004. Includes a biographical sketch of the author plus an index by Hugh MacDougall.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Chronicles of Cooperstown. Cooperstown, NY: H. and E. Phinney, 1838.
Cooper, James Fenimore [grandson]. Reminiscences of Mid-Victorian Cooperstown and a Sketch of William Cooper. Cooperstown, NY: Otsego County Historical Society, Publication no. 1, 1936 (reprinted, Cooperstown: Smithy-Pioneer Gallery, 1986).
Cooper, Susan Fenimore [daughter]. Rural Hours. 1850. London and Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Cooper, William. A Guide in the Wilderness; or, the History of the First Settlements in the Western Counties of New York, with Useful Instructions to Future Settlers. 1810. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
MacDougall, Hugh C. Cooper’s Otsego County. Cooperstown, NY: New York State Historical Association, 1989. Sites in Otsego County related to James Fenimore Cooper’s life and novels, many described in his own words.
Taylor, Alan. Willam Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
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a
True essence (French).
b
It is no more than justice to say that the Greenbush Van Rensselaers claim to be the oldest branch of that ancient and respectable family. (Cooper’s note, 1841)
c
Lest the similarity of the names should produce confusion, it may be well to say that the Uncas here mentioned is the grandfather of him who plays so conspicuous a part in The Last of the Mohicans. (Cooper’s note, 1841 )
d
Harry and Natty arrive at the lake on its eastern shore south of Point Judith.
e
Projecting pieces cut out of a piece of wood that are fit into the mortises (slots or grooves) of other pieces of wood to form joints.
f
Exploit.
g
Inertia (Latin).
h
Totality (French).
i
It is singular there should be any question concerning the origin of the well-known sobriquet of “Yankees.” Nearly all the old writers who speak of the Indians first known to the colonists make them pronounce the word “English” as “Yengeese.” Even at this day, it is a provincialism of New England to say “English” instead of “Inglish,” and there is a close conformity of sound between “English,” and “Yengeese,” more especially if the latter word, as was probably the case, be pronounced short. The transition from “Yengeese,” thus pronounced, to “Yankees” is quite easy. If the former is pronounced “Yangis,” it is almost identical with “Yankees,” and Indian words have seldom been spelled as they are pronounced. Thus the scene of this tale is spelt “Otsego,” and is properly pronounced “Otsago.” The liquids of the Indians would easily convert “En” into “Yen.” (Cooper’s note, 1841
)
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