Grim literature in the high schools?

<p>Re: J.F. Cooper. I, too, loved his books when I was a teenager. And then I read Mark Twain’s essay on Cooper, and I could never read one of his books with a straight face again. Twain’s dissection of Cooper’s style is probably one of the most effective bits of literary criticism ever. (OK, OK, it’s not Dante’s apotheosis of Virgil, or Aristotle’s Poetics, or St. John the Evangelist’s reinterpretation of the Old Testament. But it sure deflates Cooper.)</p>