James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper [pseudonym Jane Morgan] (1789-1851), American author and critic wrote The Last of the Mohicans (1826);

Cooper's depiction of American Indians was sometimes criticised as unrealistic and implausible. Over fifty years after The Deerslayer (1841) was published Mark Twain served up a heaping plate of sardonic but scathing criticism of it and Cooper in his essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895). But as Cooper writes in his Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans;