Wayne Franklin
James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years.
Yale University Press, 752 pages, $40
The reputation of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) probably never recovered from Mark Twain’s hilarious demolition of his work in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). The Deerslayer, Twain wrote in one of his milder passages, was simply the product of “a literary delirium tremens.” Or again: “In the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” But Twain was hardly alone. In fact, Cooper has had the distinction of attracting a long line of critics who have dilated on his mediocre writing and unsavory personal life.
Wayne Franklin endeavors to redress the balance with this seven-hundred-page, four- pound “major re-evaluation.” Would that a satirist of Twain’s talents were with us to give literary expression to that awful feeling that overcomes us when contemplating the book’s subtitle: “The Early Years.” Seven-hundred pages and Cooper is barely into long pants (well, his thirties). The first biographer of the prolific novelist to have full access to the family papers, Franklin has produced one of those scholarly exercises that merit the appellation “exhausting” as much as “exhaustive.” Franklin benefits from the enormous, though incomplete, labors of James F. Beard, whose work on Cooper in the last century produced editions of many of the novels as well as a six-volume edition of Cooper’s letters and journals.
Cooper’s place in American