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Poe and Twain: Cooper Reviewed and Revised.(Critical Essay)

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From: The Mississippi Quarterly
Date: 20000322
Author:DAMERON, J. LASLEY

DOROTHY PARKER, NOTED WIT AND JOURNALIST, once quipped, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."(1) With comparable wit and obvious overstatement, Mark Twain concluded that Deerslayer, a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, "is just simply a literary delirium tremens."(2) Equally candid, with less intended wit, Poe declared that the prose style of Cooper's novel Wyandotte, or the Hutted Knoll has verbal inaccuracies and sentences "arranged with awkwardness so remarkable as to be matter of astonishment...."(3)

Poe and Twain not only ...

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