"I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper"
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Fiedler’s jab lands because it’s so extravagantly unfair that it becomes diagnostic. Calling Cooper “not a writer” isn’t a literal claim; it’s a critic’s way of staging a power move. In two clipped sentences, he demotes a founding figure of American letters to a man who, until 30, could barely be trusted with a pen. The cruelty is calibrated: it doesn’t argue with Cooper’s novels, it questions the very legitimacy of the person producing them. That’s why the line stings. It shifts the debate from aesthetics to ontology.
The subtext is a larger anxiety about American literary origins. Cooper sits near the start of the national canon, and early canons invite skeptics: if the “first greats” look awkward by later standards, maybe the whole tradition is built on enthusiasm, not mastery. Fiedler’s hyperbole weaponizes that suspicion. By framing Cooper as almost pre-literate, he implies that American literature begins not in cultivated authority but in improvisation, aspiration, even fraudulence.
Context matters: mid-20th-century criticism loved demolition as a form of seriousness. Fiedler, a contrarian with a taste for myth-busting, often treated “American classics” as cultural symptoms - wish-fulfillment, moral theater, national self-deception. This line performs that method in miniature. It’s not just an insult; it’s a reclassification. Cooper becomes less an artist than an accident of history, and the reader is dared to enjoy the blasphemy while reconsidering what we mean when we call something “literary” in the first place.
The subtext is a larger anxiety about American literary origins. Cooper sits near the start of the national canon, and early canons invite skeptics: if the “first greats” look awkward by later standards, maybe the whole tradition is built on enthusiasm, not mastery. Fiedler’s hyperbole weaponizes that suspicion. By framing Cooper as almost pre-literate, he implies that American literature begins not in cultivated authority but in improvisation, aspiration, even fraudulence.
Context matters: mid-20th-century criticism loved demolition as a form of seriousness. Fiedler, a contrarian with a taste for myth-busting, often treated “American classics” as cultural symptoms - wish-fulfillment, moral theater, national self-deception. This line performs that method in miniature. It’s not just an insult; it’s a reclassification. Cooper becomes less an artist than an accident of history, and the reader is dared to enjoy the blasphemy while reconsidering what we mean when we call something “literary” in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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