Cooper, James Fenimore

born Sept. 15, 1789, Burlington, N.J., U.S.

died Sept. 14, 1851, Cooperstown, N.Y.

The first major U.S. novelist.

Cooper grew up in a prosperous family in the settlement of Cooperstown, founded by his father. The Spy (1821), set during the American Revolution, brought him fame. His best-known novels, the series The Leatherstocking Tales, feature the frontier adventures of the wilderness scout Natty Bumppo and include The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). He also wrote popular sea novels, notably The Pilot (1823), and a history of the U.S. Navy (1839). Though internationally celebrated, he was troubled by lawsuits and political conflicts in his later years, and his popularity and income declined.

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▪ American author

Introduction

born September 15, 1789, Burlington, New Jersey, U.S.

died September 14, 1851, Cooperstown, New York

      first major U.S. novelist, author of the novels of frontier adventure known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the wilderness scout called Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye. They include The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841).

Early years

      Cooper's mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, was a member of a respectable New Jersey Quaker family, and his father, William, founded a frontier settlement at the source of the Susquehanna River (now Cooperstown, New York) and served as a Federalist congressman during the administrations of George Washington (Washington, George) and John Adams (Adams, John). It was a most appropriate family background for a writer who, by the time of his death, was generally considered America's “national novelist.”

      James was but a year old when William Cooper moved his family to the primitive settlement in upstate New York. He was doubtless fortunate to be the 11th of 12 children, for he was spared the worst hardships of frontier life while he was able to benefit educationally from both the rich oral traditions of his family and a material prosperity that afforded him a gentleman's education. After private schooling in Albany, Cooper attended Yale from 1803 to 1805. Little is known of his college career other than that he was the best Latin scholar of his class and was expelled in his junior year because of a prank. Since high spirits seemed to fit him for an active life, his family allowed him to join the navy as a midshipman. But prolonged shore duty at several New York stations merely substituted naval for academic discipline. His father's death in 1809 left him financially independent, and in 1811 he married Susan De Lancy and resigned from the navy.

      For 10 years after his marriage Cooper led the active but unproductive life of a dilettante, dabbling in agriculture, politics, the American Bible Society, and the Westchester militia. It was in this amateur spirit that he wrote and published his first fiction, reputedly on a challenge from his wife. Precaution (1820) was a plodding imitation of Jane Austen (Austen, Jane)'s novels of English gentry manners. It is mainly interesting today as a document in the history of American cultural colonialism and as an example of a clumsy attempt to imitate Jane Austen's investigation of the ironic discrepancy between illusion and reality. His second novel, The Spy (1821), was based on another British model, Sir Walter Scott (Scott, Sir Walter, 1st Baronet)'s “Waverley” novels, stories of adventure and romance set in 17th- and 18th-century Scotland. But in The Spy Cooper broke new ground by using an American Revolutionary War setting (based partly on the experiences of his wife's British loyalist family) and by introducing several distinctively American character types. Like Scott's novels of Scotland, The Spy is a drama of conflicting loyalties and interests in which the action mirrors and expresses more subtle internal psychological tensions. The Spy soon brought him international fame and a certain amount of wealth. The latter was very welcome, indeed necessary, since his father's estate had proved less ample than had been thought, and, with the death of his elder brothers, he had found himself responsible for the debts and widows of the entire Cooper family.

Novels

      The first of the renowned “Leatherstocking” tales, The Pioneers (1823), followed and adhered to the successful formula of The Spy, reproducing its basic thematic conflicts and utilizing family traditions once again. In The Pioneers, however, the traditions were those of William Cooper of Cooperstown, who appears as Judge Temple of Templeton, along with many other lightly disguised inhabitants of James's boyhood village. No known prototype exists, however, for the novel's principal character—the former wilderness scout Natty Bumppo, alias Leatherstocking. The Leatherstocking of The Pioneers is an aged man, of rough but sterling character, who ineffectually opposes “the march of progress,” namely, the agricultural frontier and its chief spokesman, Judge Temple. Fundamentally, the conflict is between rival versions of the American Eden: the “God's Wilderness” of Leatherstocking and the cultivated garden of Judge Temple. Since Cooper himself was deeply attracted to both ideals, he was able to create a powerful and moving story of frontier life. Indeed, The Pioneers is both the first and finest detailed portrait of frontier life in American literature; it is also the first truly original American novel.

      Both Cooper and his public were fascinated by the Leatherstocking character. He was encouraged to write a series of sequels in which the entire life of the frontier scout was gradually unfolded. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) takes the reader back to the French and Indian wars of Natty's middle age, when he is at the height of his powers. That work was succeeded by The Prairie (1827) in which, now very old and philosophical, Leatherstocking dies, facing the westering sun he has so long followed. (The five novels of the series were not written in their narrative order.) Identified from the start with the vanishing wilderness and its natives, Leatherstocking was an unalterably elegiac figure, wifeless and childless, hauntingly loyal to a lost cause. This conception of the character was not fully realized in The Pioneers, however, because Cooper's main concern with depicting frontier life led him to endow Leatherstocking with some comic traits and make his laments, at times, little more than whines or grumbles. But in these sequels Cooper retreated stylistically from a realistic picture of the frontier in order to portray a more idyllic and romantic wilderness; by doing so he could exploit the parallels between the American Indians and the forlorn Celtic heroes of James Macpherson's pseudo-epic Ossian, leaving Leatherstocking intact but slightly idealized and making extensive use of Macpherson's imagery and rhetoric.

      Cooper intended to bury Leatherstocking in The Prairie, but many years later he resuscitated the character and portrayed his early maturity in The Pathfinder (1840) and his youth in The Deerslayer (1841). These novels, in which Natty becomes the centre of romantic interest for the first time, carry the idealization process further. In The Pathfinder he is explicitly described as an American Adam, while in The Deerslayer he demonstrates his fitness as a warrior-saint by passing a series of moral trials and revealing a keen, though untutored, aesthetic sensibility.

      The “Leatherstocking” tales are Cooper's great imperfect masterpiece, but he continued to write many other volumes of fiction and nonfiction. His fourth novel, The Pilot (1823), inaugurated a series of sea novels, which were at once as popular and influential as the “Leatherstocking” tales. And they were more authentic: such Westerners as General Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory, and Mark Twain might ridicule Cooper's woodcraft, but old salts like Herman Melville (Melville, Herman) and Joseph Conrad (Conrad, Joseph) rightly admired and learned from his sea stories, in particular The Red Rover (1827) and The Sea Lions (1849). Never before in prose fiction had the sea become not merely a theatre for, but the principal actor in, moral drama that celebrated man's courage and skill at the same time that it revealed him humbled by the forces of God's nature. As developed by Cooper, and later by Melville, the sea novel became a powerful vehicle for spiritual as well as moral exploration. Not satisfied with mere fictional treatment of life at sea, Cooper also wrote a meticulously researched, highly readable History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839).

Cultural and political involvement

      Though most renowned as a prolific novelist, he did not simply retire to his study after the success of The Spy. Between 1822 and 1826 he lived in New York City and participated in its intellectual life, founding the Bread and Cheese Club, which included such members as the poets Fitz-Greene Halleck (Halleck, Fitz-Greene) and William Cullen Bryant (Bryant, William Cullen), the painter and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse (Morse, Samuel F.B.), and the great Federalist judge James Kent (Kent, James). Like Cooper himself, these were men active in both cultural and political affairs.

      Cooper's own increasing liberalism was confirmed by a lengthy stay (1826–33) in Europe, where he moved for the education of his son and four daughters. Those years coincided with a period of revolutionary ferment in Europe, and, because of a close friendship that he developed with the old American Revolutionary War hero Lafayette (Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de), he was kept well-informed about Europe's political developments. Through his novels, most notably The Bravo (1831), and other more openly polemical writings, he attacked the corruption and tyranny of oligarchical regimes in Europe. His active championship of the principles of political democracy (though never of social egalitarianism) coincided with a steep decline in his literary popularity in America, which he attributed to a decline in democratic feeling among the reading—i.e. the propertied—classes to which he himself belonged.

Return to America

      When he returned to America, he settled first in New York City and then for the remainder of his life in Cooperstown. In the gentlemanly tradition of Jefferson and Lafayette he attacked the oligarchical party of his day, in this case the Whig Party, which opposed President Andrew Jackson, the exponent of a more egalitarian form of democracy. The Whigs, however, were soon able to turn the tables on Cooper and other leading Jacksonians by employing Jackson's egalitarian rhetoric against them. Squire Cooper had made himself especially vulnerable to popular feeling when, in 1837, he refused to let local citizens picnic on a family property known as Three Mile Point. This incident led to a whole series of charges of libel, and suits and countersuits by both the Whigs and Cooper. At this time, too, agrarian riots on the estates of his old New York friends shattered his simple Jeffersonian faith in the virtue of the American farmer. All of this conflict and unrest was hard to bear, and harder still because he was writing more and earning less as the years went by. The public, which had reveled in his early forest and sea romances, was not interested in his acute political treatise, The American Democrat (1838), or even in such political satires as The Monikins (1835) or Home As Found (1838). And though he wrote some of his best romances—particularly the later “Leatherstocking” tales and Satanstoe (1845)—during the last decade of his life, profits from publishing so diminished that he gained little benefit from improved popularity. Though his circumstances were never straitened, he had to go on writing; and some of the later novels, such as Mercedes of Castile (1840) or Jack Tier (1846–48), were mere hackwork. His buoyant political optimism had largely given way to calm Christian faith, though he never lost his troubled concern for the well-being of his country.

George G. Dekker

Major Works

Novels.

Precaution (1820); The Spy (1821); The Pioneers (1823); The Pilot (1823); Lionel Lincoln (1824); The Last of the Mohicans (1826); The Prairie (1827); The Red Rover (1827); The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829); The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830); The Bravo (1831); The Monikins (1835); Homeward Bound (1838); Home As Found (1838); The Pathfinder (1840); The Deerslayer (1841); The Two Admirals (1842); The Wing-and-Wing; or, Le Feu-follet (1842); Wyandotté; or, The Hutted Knoll (1843); Ned Myers (1843); Afloat and Ashore (1844); Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts (1845); The Chain-Bearer (1845); The Redskins: or, Indian and Injin (1846); The Crater: or, Vulcan's Peak (1847); The Sea Lions (1849); The Ways of the Hour (1850).

Other works

Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828); A Letter to His Countrymen (1834); Sketches of Switzerland (1836); Gleanings in Europe (1837); The American Democrat (1838); The History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839).

Additional Reading

R.E. Spiller and P.C. Blackburn, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1934), is now somewhat out of date but still standard. The major depository for Cooper's papers is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. James F. Beard (ed.), Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 6 vol. (1960–68), is a monument of precision and learning. Cooper's works have otherwise not been edited definitively. Important collected editions of his novels are J. Fenimore Cooper's Works, Household Edition, 32 vol. (1876–84), with introductions by Cooper's daughter Susan; and The Works of James Fenimore Cooper, Mohawk Edition (1895–1900). His most popular individual works are available in paperback.The fullest and most accurate biographical account is that contained in James F. Beard's prefaces and notes to the Letters and Journals. James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (1949), is a sound and readable critical biography.Important critical studies include: Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences,” North American Review, vol. 161 (1895), unfair, but shrewd and funny; D.H. Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels,” Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), factually inaccurate but brilliantly suggestive; Yvor Winters, “Fenimore Cooper, or the Ruins of Time,” In Defense of Reason (1947), first published in 1938, a masterly reappraisal of Cooper's life and writings; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950), establishes Leatherstocking's place in the development of the mythology of the American West; Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (1961), a definitive study, notable for exhaustive scholarship and penetrating criticism; Donald A. Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (1962), an able critical survey of Cooper's fiction; Kay S. House, Cooper's Americans (1966), a pioneering study of Cooper's character types and methods of characterization; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper (1967), an examination of Cooper's achievement as a historical novelist; Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (1978), presenting the thesis of “a son who was trying to find himself by means of his novels” to overcome his father's psychical domination.

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