Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

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.

[3] Twain begins by quoting a few critics who praise the works of Cooper: Brander Matthews, Thomas Lounsbury, and Wilkie Collins.

[4] Twain's analysis was foreshadowed seven decades earlier by John Neal's critique of Cooper in American Writers (1824–25).

[5] Everett Emerson (in Mark Twain: A Literary Life) wrote that the essay is "possibly the author's funniest".

"[9] Similarly, John McWilliams comments: Hilarious though Twain's essay is, it is valid only within its own narrow and sometimes misapplied criteria.