The Pilot. A Tale of the Sea

After earning a sizable reputation as a prankster (he was expelled from Yale when he trained a donkey to sit in his professor's chair), James Fenimore Cooper rose to even greater fame as the author of the popular novels The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, and The Pathfinder. Cooper's work was admired by the masses and derided by the literati, who gleefully satirized his writings (cf. Mark Twain, "James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," and Bret Harte, "Muck-a-Muck").