The Monikins is an 1835 novel, written by James Fenimore Cooper. The novel, a beast fable, was written between his composition of two of his more famous novels from the Leatherstocking Tales, The Prairie and The Pathfinder. [1] The critic Christina Starobin compares the novel's plot to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. [1] The novel is a satire, narrated by the main character, the English Sir John Goldencalf. Goldencalf and the American captain Noah Poke travel on a series of humorous adventures to an Antarctic archipelago inhabited by a race of civilized monkeys. [2]
The novel is not very popular with Cooper's readers. [2] A contemporary critic of the novel in The Knickerbocker described it with great disappointment. [3]