James Fennimore Cooper

1789-1851

James Fennimore Cooper was born in New Jersey into the family of Judge William Cooper. When he was only a year old, he was taken to what is now Cooperstown, New York State. Cooper was privately educated by an English tutor on the family estate, and grew up as a young aristocrat. He studied at Yale without much interest or distinction, and left the University without taking a degree. In 1808 he entered the US Navy; three years later he married, left the Navy, and settled down in Cooperstown to assume his inherited role as cultivated country gentleman.

Cooper's first really noted novel was The Spy (1821), an absorbing tale of the American Revolution. The book met a long-felt desire of the American people to see their own heroic past, and had an immediate success. Its chief figure - the shrewd peddler; Harvey Birch, who played the role of American agent to perfection and "died as he had lived, devoted to his country, and a martyr to her liberties". Harvey Birch is one of the major character creations of early American fiction.

Thereafter Cooper devoted his life entirely to writing, producing thirty-three novels in addition to numerous histories and other works.

Cooper moved the setting of his next novel The Pioneers (1823) to the life he knew as a boy in Cooperstown. The novel introduced Cooper's second and greatest character. Natty Bumppo, the noble frontiersman. Such was the hold of the figure of the "white woodsman" on Cooper's imagination that he returned again and again to the character, presenting him successively in The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer.

Immediately after The Pioneers came The Pilot (1824), the first of Cooper's eleven sea-novels, and the one which introduced his third major character, Long Tom Coffin, the prototype of the tough, wise, salty Yankee sailor.

Within but three years Cooper opened three great literary themes based on native materials - the Revolution, the frontier, and the sea.

During the years 1826-33 Cooper travelled in Europe, where he met W. Scott and other literary men. In 1828, he published his Notions of the Americans, vindicating American society. Upon his return, however, he was dissatisfied with American democracy as being in contradiction with his aristocratic notions, and pursued his ideas of agrarianism in pamphlet and novel. Homeward Bound, Home as Found and The American Democrat were constructive critiques of the American way of life. All that brought Cooper into disfavor, but he persisted in his ideas to the very end of his life.

As well as Irving in his short stories Cooper in his novels began with transplantation of English models, their manner and style, at least. But the American subject, the American history and geography he referred to, native habits and customs he described made his works the American product Cooper was one of the first to prove that the world would read American authors.

CHIEF WORKS

Precaution (1820) The Spy (1821)

The Pioneers (1823)

The Pilot (1824)

The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

The Prairie (1827)

Notions of the Americans (1828)

The Manikins (1835)

The American Democrat; Homeward Bound; Home as Found (1838)

History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839)

The Pathfinder (1840)

The Deerslayer (1841)

Afloat and Ashore; Miles Wallingford (1844)

Satanstoe; The Chainbearer (1845)

The Crater (1847) The Oak Openings (1848)

The Sea Lions (1849)

The Ways of the Hour (1850)

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