In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. He then claims that they have never read the novels themselves, and that Cooper's work is seriously flawed: Twain begins by quoting a few critics who praise the works of Cooper: Brander Matthews, Thomas Lounsbury and Wilkie Collins. 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. It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. " 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. James Fenimore Cooper in an 1822 portrait
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