James Fenimore Cooper's Impact On American Literature

James Fenimore Cooper was one of the greatest writers of all time. Nature was his greatest influence and wrote about it frequently in his novels. He wrote historical novels based on American themes and characters. In both his fictions and nonfiction novels he proved himself an intelligent social critic. Cooper was one of America 's first great novelist who helped create a sense of American history through his writings during the post revolutionary time period from 1780’s through the 1830’s.

He wrote his novels during the post revolutionary United States literary time period. This time period was from 1780’s through the 1830’s (“James”). During this time period there was a lot of conflict between the Indians and the Americans (Biography). During Cooper early years was when Americans were farming, clearing and

Mark twain was Cooper’s biggest critic. He wrote the essay Fenimore Cooper 's literary offenses as a satire and criticism of Cooper. Twain gave examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder which are both from Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. In the essay twain says that Cooper is guilty of four plotting, verbose writing and cardboard characters (Biography). Mark twain demolished coopers romanticism in his novels. Cooper’s tone was also criticized as being reactionary, romantic and pedagogical in tone. Sydney Krause States that all of the harsh criticism and the bad talk about Cooper is not the words of a person with good judgment. She is not saying that Mark is wrong, but that he is over stressing the criticism and even though she does agree with him in some ways Cooper is still an amazing writer (“James”). John McWilliams also believes that Mark twain‘s attack on Cooper is not justified. He thinks that Cooper does have his flaws as a writer, but that Mark is taking the smallest in accuracy and changing of the story to prevent people from seeing the truth