[A.J.Armitage]

And if you ever get to the earlier American writers, I personally believe that John Smith's journals were greatly exaggerated and that James Fennimore Cooper's stories stunk.

Mark Twain wrote something called The Literary Offences of James Fennimore Cooper. I've never read it, though.

[FreedominJesusChrist]

Really? Twain was good at satire...but I never knew that he believe Cooper to be a bad writer too.

I had to read Cooper in high school and it was practically insufferable.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Mark Twain wrote something called The Literary Offences of James Fennimore Cooper. I've never read it, though.

As I understand it, Twain had two major gripes with Cooper. One was his literary style, which is definitely pre-modern. The other was that Cooper clearly felt that individual American Indians were capable of high moral qualities. As an American who lived near the frontier, Twain did not consider Amerindians to be truly human.