I have a few questions that go along with this, first:
-“The Last of The Mohicans” was a blockbuster, in the USA and Europe-It Made Cooper’s reputation
Yet, did the guy actually do any research on his characters?
-Was “Chingachgooch” are real indian name? (It sounds like something Cooper invented)
-Likewise “Natty Bumpo”-is this name eevn closeto a nmae that a colonial era backwoodsman would use?
Mart Twain commented on JF Cooper’s screwups extensively-would he be considered a good writer today?
I think the guy tended to overdo it-he could have shortened a lot of his paragraphs. Whole generations of suffring HS english class students probably think the same.
Mark Twain’s takedown of Cooperwas epic.
I call presentism. You’re criticizing him primarily because he didn’t write his novels in the 21st century. Your basic assumptions – that an author does research to get everything correct, that names have to reflect actual names, that long paragraphs are bad writing – are misleading you from the start.
Being accurate and doing research has nothing to do with quality of writing (it never stopped Shakespeare). Neither does writing in a different style. Throw those assumptions out to begin with.
Twain is guilty of the same thing, BTW:
Do you see the fallacy here? Twain assumes “a modern canal boat” is “a canal boat of 1895.” Cooper clearly did not know what dimensions a canal boat would have in 1895; the book was written a half century later. Yet Twain uses that as something to attack Cooper on.
Now, with that out of the way, Twain does make a good case for problems with Cooper’s writing. But does that make him a bad writer? Not necessarily. The things described in the essay may seem nonsensical, but if they work dramatically, then Cooper is doing his job.
I haven’t read any Cooper, so I can’t say as to how good or bad he really was. Twain makes a good case, but then, critics made a good case that Moby Dick was a terrible novel (and that Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth was America’s greatest writer) in the 19th century. At best, the question is how well it fits into our perception of great writing – and that perception is constantly changing.
ETA, if you’re asking if Cooper were writing today, would he be considered a great writer, the basic answer is “no,” since your assumptions are how people judge modern writers. OTOH, if Cooper were writing today, he’d be doing more research and writing in a less wordy style, so it could be a wash.
Back when I read Cooper in high school (TORTURE!), I kinda felt like Tom Clancy was his modern day successor in spirit. I’m guessing most of Clancy’s output may be equally as opaque to readers at the end of the 21st century. But I doubt kids then will be subjected to slogging through Executive Orders in school.
I wouldn’t compare Cooper with Tom Clancy, after all Clancy does (or at least did) do research and tried to get things right.
Maybe early and mid Michael Crichton (before-the-crazy). Sounds all exotic but authoritative to people who don’t know anything about the subject, and full of ridiculous errors and plot holes to those who do, but there are enough of the former to make him a famous best-selling author. I think Crichton might write better sentences, but I think we give a lot of adjustment for the time period and level of competition on that one.
Yikes! That’s some cold reviewing there.
But who cares?
As has been pointed out, Shakespeare got all kinds of things wrong; he was particularly fond of writing things that are geographically impossible, such as having people embark on ocean voyages from cities that aren’t anywhere near the ocean. Clancy may do a lot of research (though I question how perfectly accurate he is) but his writing is long and boring and shitty all the same.
Are Cooper’s novels entertaining? Interesting? Artistically challenging? I find those questions more relevant than whether “Chingachgooch” was a real Indian name.
Those are a number of worthwhile points, to be sure, but you’re doing the argument half a disservice by asking if the novels are entertaining: that’s probably not a requirement for being a “great” writer, even today. Whether they are artistically challenging is a more reasonable question.
Cooper wrote books we call novels today, but he himself insisted on calling them tales, and later, romances. This is a major thing to note, because in the 1820, 30s, 40s, a romance and a novel were two different things. Novels, such as the Regency novels of manners, were fairly geared towards verisimilitude, and sought to present society as it was. Romances, by contrast, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous statement on them in the “Custom House Sketch,” gave the author more freedom to stray away from realism towards artistic goals. Cooper started out as a novelist, but by the time of his most famous books, he had clearly become a romancier (Twain, although himself a fabulous teller of tall tales, was writing in the middle of American Realism, of course, a genre far more heir to Austen than to Cooper).
So, Cooper didn’t write realistic fiction because he did not care to do so. Nor did his readers expect it.
Now, was Cooper a great writer? Frankly, not in my book: Cooper is a historic figures because of the way he managed to survive on writing alone, and because he brought American topics into popular appeal; specifically, it was the combination of both which makes him important. But his prose is stultifying (compare his to contemporaries such as Washington Irving, or even John Neal), his dialogues cringeworthy, and his plots rambling.
Actually, critics made no good case that Moby Dick was a terrible novel: if anything, it puzzled them to no end. If you check the Norton edition of Moby Dick, very few arguments were actually provided by the detractors. It was too long; it was absurd as a whole; and various other re-phrasings of “I don’t like it,” but no critical argument against it. By contrast, there are a number of well-argued analyses of why Moby Dick was great writing. Melville was forgotten, and didn’t sell well, but there was never a case against his being a great writer that was, in way, a “good” case.
Cooper was immensely popular in France and phenomenally popular in Russia- in The Brothers Karamazov, America is actually referred to as “the land of James Fenimore Cooper.”
It makes me wonder if Copper had amazingly talented French and Russian translators.
You may have put your finger on the problem here: Cooper was not, as Twain points hilariously, a gifted crafter of prose. Translators can (and IMO must) change sentences around and NOT literally transcribe their awkwardness and flaws but express the original author’s thought in their own language, so the books may actually be improved in translation. The clunky dialogue, for example, may emerge as smooth and natural, the labored descriptive passages as beautiful and inspiring.
Cooper -> London -> Fleming -> Dan Brown?
i wouldn’t say “great” writer, but certainly published and successful, as long as he could find something to write about that was as appealing to readers as the frontier was to readers of the early 1800s.