Volume 43, Number 13 · August 8, 1996
The Would-Be Gentleman
By Gordon S. Wood
William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
by Alan Taylor
Knopf, 549 pp., $35.00
Who reads James Fenimore Cooper anymore? The archaic diction, convoluted sentences, stilted dialogue, awkward characterization, and implausible incidents in his novels do not seem to appeal to young people today any more than they did to Mark Twain a century ago. Indeed, it is probably true, as a colleague recently said to me, that more people today read Mark Twain's spoof of Cooper than read Cooper himself. Twain said there were nineteen rules governing literary art in romantic fiction, and Cooper broke eighteen of them. His humor was pathetic, his pathos was funny, and his use of English was 'a crime against the language.'
Review, 4077 words
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