Charles Fenno Hoffman (February 7, 1806 – June 7, 1884) was an American author, poet and editor associated with the Knickerbocker Group in New York.

His elder half-brother from his father's first marriage to Mary Colden was Ogden Hoffman, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1837 to 1841.

[1] Hoffman, who was proud of his ancestry, was the grandson of John Fenno, the Federalist editor of the Gazette of the United States.

He wrote a successful novel, Greyslaer (1840),[3] based on the murder of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp by Jereboam O. Beauchamp, known as the Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy—an event that several writers, including Thomas Holley Chivers, Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms, also fictionalized.

Literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold that year dedicated twice as much space to Hoffman than any other author in his respected anthology The Poets and Poetry of America.

He was hospitalized briefly in April 1849 and, after his release, he accepted a position with the Department of State in Washington, D.C. By autumn, however, he was declared permanently insane.