Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Rulebook and the Body Count

Twain's central device is a list of rules that he says govern literary art in romantic fiction. He does not claim these are his own invention but presents them as established standards. The first rule requires that a tale “shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere,” and he asserts that The Deerslayer fails entirely. Subsequent rules demand that episodes be necessary, characters distinguishable from corpses, and conversation sound like human talk with discoverable meaning. Twain argues that Cooper violates all of these, often simultaneously. The most famous passage is his claim that in a two-thirds-page stretch of The Deerslayer he found 114 offences out of a possible 115. This numerical precision is part of Twain's rhetorical strategy: he treats literary faults as countable, measurable failures, as if applying a scientific audit to fiction.

The Bullet Hole and the Talking Dialect

Twain devotes considerable space to a single scene from The Pathfinder in which a character shoots a bullet into an existing hole in a target at a hundred yards, without fraying the edges. Twain mocks the implausibility—three bullets in one hole, known to everyone without verification—and calls Cooper “not a close observer, but he is interesting.” He then turns to dialogue, quoting Deerslayer's shift from book-talk (“She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees”) to base dialect (“It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a fri'nd”). Twain argues that Cooper failed to notice that a man who talks corrupt English six days a week cannot switch to polished speech on the seventh. The inconsistency, he implies, reveals a deeper inattention to character consistency.

Theatrical Commanders and Wandering Talk

Twain also targets Cooper's depiction of military command. He cites a scene in which a veteran Scottish commander shouts melodramatic lines during a chase, comparing him to a “windy melodramatic actor.” This, Twain suggests, is another failure of observation: real soldiers do not behave that way. He extends the critique to conversation generally, describing Cooper's dialogue as a “rolling-mill” that stretches two-minute remarks into ten-minute speeches, wandering off topic and arriving nowhere. The talk, he says, consists mainly of irrelevancies with an occasional embarrassed relevancy. These observations are not merely stylistic complaints; they are evidence for Twain's larger claim that Cooper's work lacks the discipline of verisimilitude. The essay thus functions as a case study in what happens when a writer ignores the basic rules of credible fiction.

Twain's essay is best read as a performance of critical demolition rather than a balanced assessment. It assumes the reader knows Cooper's novels well enough to recognize the targets. The humor depends on Twain's deadpan enumeration of faults and his ability to make a technical argument entertaining. Readers unfamiliar with The Deerslayer or The Pathfinder may find the essay puzzling without those texts at hand. Approaching it as a companion piece to the novels—or as a specimen of Twain's own literary principles in action—will yield more than treating it as a standalone review.

Reading Twain’s tally of Cooper’s offenses, I kept thinking how much we forgive a poor craftsman when his heart is in the right place. There’s a similar, humbler charm in The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money — Context and Discussion, a scrappier kind of honesty, less elegant but just as revealing of its age. I find I treasure both for what they accidentally confess, not what they set out to prove.