Bumppo Bashing

August 27: On this day in 1841 James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, last-written of the five Natty Bumppo/Leatherstocking books, was published. In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” Mark Twain finds the novel guilty of breaking eighteen of his nineteen rules for romantic fiction, including Rule Three: “That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.”