James Fenimore Cooper

(from the Oxford Companion to American Literature)

James Fenimore COOPER (1789-1851), was born at Burlington, N.J., the son of William Cooper, who in 1790 removed his family to Otsego Hall, a manorial estate at Cooperstown on Otsego Lake, west of Albany, N.Y. Educated at the local school and in Albany, Cooper went to Yale, from which he was dismissed (1806). During the next five years he served at sea as a foremast-hand, was a midshipman in the navy (1808-11), and left to marry and settle as a country gentleman at Mamaroneck. He moved to Cooperstown (1814), but in 1817 moved again to a farm at Scarsdale.

At 30 he was suddenly plunged into a literary career, when his wife challenged his claim that he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her. The result was Precaution (1820), a conventional novel of manners in genteel English society. His second book, The Spy (1821), was an immediate success and established Cooper's typical attitude towards plot and characterization, being significant for its use of the American scene as the background of a romance. In The Pioneers (1823) he began his series of Leather-Stocking Tales, but in his rapid quest for unusual subjects he turned to the sea in The Pilot (1823), intending to prove that a sailor could write a better novel than the landsman Scott had done in The Pirate (1822).

Established as a leading American author, he moved to New York City, where he founded the Bread and Cheese Club. To further his position as the outstanding American novelist, he planned to write 13 national romances, one for each of the original states, but wrote only Lionel Lincoln (1825), dealing with Revolutionary Boston. Encouraged by the success of The Pioneers and the growing interest in the clash between savagery and civilization on the frontier, he continued his history of the pioneer scout Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). While traveling abroad (1826-33), nominally as U.S. consul at Lyons, he published The Red Rover (1827), The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) and The Water-Witch (1830), romances about America and life on American ships. In addition, he wrote The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832), and The Headsman (1833), a trilogy intended to dispel the glamor of feudalism and to show its decline before the rise of democratic liberalism. A Letter  . . . to General Lafayette (1831) champions republics against monarchies, and Notions of the Americans (1828) is an answer to English critics of U.S. society and government.

Upon his return, Cooper in turn was repelled by the absence of what he considered to be public and private virtue, the abuses of democracy, and the failure to perceive the best elements of the life he had conjured up in his novels. A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), petulantly expressing his conservatism, was followed by his satire, The Monikins (1835), and four volumes of Gleanings in Europe (1837-38), containing brilliant descriptions and pungent social criticism. The American Democrat (1838), a full statement of his aristocratic social ideals, was followed by Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838), fictional statements of these themes.

During the ensuing years, the press attacked his books and personal character, and he brought suits for libel against various Whig papers, arguing his own cases so successfully that he was regularly victorious. He returned to live at Cooperstown, where his favorite companion and amanuensis for the rest of his life was his daughter Susan, whose books describe their home. Here he carried his war with the press to a war with the people concerning property rights, in which, although he was constantly vindicated, he stood alone and unpopular.

Meanwhile he wrote a scholarly History of the Navy (1839), whose simplicity and gusto were overlooked in a controversy centering on his treatment of the Battle of Lake Erie. With the publication of The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) he completed the epical Leather-Stocking series, and in a burst of creative energy wrote 16 works of fiction, a great amount of controversial literature, and some scholarly and factual works. Mercedes of Castile (1840) deals with the first voyage of Columbus; The Two Admirals (1842) is a story of the British Navy before the Revolutionary War; and Wing-and-Wing (1842) is concerned with a French privateer in the Mediterranean. Ned Meyers (1843) is the fictional biography of a former shipmate, and the Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846) supplements the History of the Navy. Wyandotté (1843) deals with the outbreak of the Revolution in New York; Le Mouchoir (1843), republished as The Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, is a short romance of New York society and class distinctions; Afloat and Ashore (1844) and its sequel Miles Wallingford (1844) seem to present a self-portrait of Cooper; The Crater (1848) is a Utopian social allegory; and Jack Tier (1848), The Oak Openings (1848) and The Sea Lions (1848) are all swift-moving historical romances. Cooper's last novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850), concerned with the perversions of social justice, is a forerunner of the modern mystery novel. Another late work is an unpublished comedy, Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats, produced in New York. Of the novels written after 1840, the most important are those in the trilogy known as the Littlepage Manuscripts: Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846), tracing the growing difficulties between propertied and propertyless classes in New York. A collection of Letters and Journals (6 vols., 1960-68), by James F. Beard gathers all known previously unpublished manuscripts.

Cooper's achievement, although uneven and the result of brilliant improvisation rather than a deeply considered artistry, was nevertheless sustained almost to the close of a hectic, crowded career. His worldwide fame attests his power of invention, for his novels have been popular principally for their variety of dramatic incidents, vivid descriptions of romantic scenes and situations, and adventurous plots. But a more sophisticated view caused a revival of interest in the mid-20th century concentrating on Cooper's novels in their creation of tension between different kinds of society, the settlement and the wilderness, and between civil law and natural rights as these suggest issues of moral and mythic import.






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