Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is an 1895 essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire and criticism of the writings of James Fenimore Cooper. It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. The essay is characteristic of Twain's biting, derisive and highly satirical style of literary criticism, a form he also used to deride such authors as Oliver Goldsmith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.