Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851)

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

Sources

Novelist

Novelist by Chance. James Cooper (he added Fenimore, his mother’s name, in 1826) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on 15 September 1789. He grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a settlement founded on Otsego Lake by his father, William, a prominent land speculator, judge, and Federalist politician. At the age of thirteen James attended Yale, but he was expelled in his third year, apparently for a prank. He then served in the U.S. Navy for several years. In January 1811, Cooper resigned his commission and married Susan DeLancey, heiress to what Cooper called “a handsome fortune.” With his new wife, Cooper settled down as a gentleman-farmer. There was nothing in Cooper’s experience to suggest that he would become a man of letters, much less a professional novelist, and nothing to suggest that he would go on to create one of the most influential Western characters in American literature. It was said that he could not bear to even write a letter. However, as Cooper’s daughter later recalled, in 1820 Cooper was reading aloud a new British novel to his wife when he suddenly flung it down in disgust. He found it tedious and proclaimed, “I can write you a better novel than that, myself!” His wife challenged him to do so, and he quickly wrote and published Precaution (1820). Precaution was well received in England and America, and in 1821 Cooper followed it with another novel, The Spy, an adventure tale set during the American Revolution. A literary career was launched.

The Creation of Leatherstocking. It was Cooper’s next novel, The Pioneers (1823), that established him as a successful American author. The Pioneers is set in Templeton, on the shores of Lake Otsego, in the late eighteenth century. Cooper describes the areas as a onetime primeval forest being developed into a village. The novel’s fundamental conflict is played out between the town’s founder, Judge Temple, a Christian gentleman and proprietor of a large tract of land, and Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, a hunter and trapper who has lived peacefully with his Indian companion, Chingachgook, on the judge’s land. Leatherstocking is a man of the forest, a kindred spirit of its wildlife. He is steeped in Indian lore and the moral code of nature and is disgusted by the sometimes senseless and destructive acts of the settlers. Judge Temple is also disgusted, but as a representative of refined society he sees the law as the solution to the excesses of civilization. Thus, when Natty is arrested for killing a single deer out of season, the Judge is forced to sentence him to jail. Leatherstocking chooses to leave the settlement, disappearing into the woods. The novel suggests that Judge Temple is right to apply the law and it also warns that the wilderness must not be sacrificed in the westward march of American civilization.

Natty’s Youth and Death. After writing a novel of the sea, The Pilot (1824), and a second American Revolution novel, Lionel Lincoln (1825), Cooper returned to the adventures of Leatherstocking in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). Both novels examine the moral implications of Westward expansion. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, when Leatherstocking, here known as Hawkeye, is a young man. The novel is primarily an adventure tale set in the wilderness during the French and Indian War. Hawkeye, more so than any of the white characters in the book, respects the wilderness and understands the Indians who live there. He warns the white characters (and by extension, Cooper’s white readers) of their arrogance: “If you judge of Indian cunning by the rules you find in books, or by white sagacity, they will lead you astray, if not to your death.” Hawkeye’s humility and virtue allow him to survive in the wilderness. However, as we know from the end of The Pioneers, neither Natty nor the Indians will flourish for long. The Prairie, which portrays Leatherstocking at eighty, completes the cycle begun by the first two novels. The process of expansion has continued into the Great Plains, and the squatters and trappers who lead the way are lawless and reckless, possessing little regard for either law or nature. In his old age Leatherstocking has achieved the necessary virtue and discipline to live free, but he is pursued into the wilderness by those who, as Judge Temple once feared, abuse freedom. At the end of the novel Leatherstocking dies quietly, standing upright and calling out to his maker, “Here!” His grave is guarded by Pawnee Indians as the “spot where a just White-man sleeps.”

Europe and America. With the publication of The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, Cooper enjoyed great success. He was called the “American Scott,” after the popular British novelist Sir Walter Scott. In 1826 he sailed for Europe, where he visited England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. During his seven-year stay in Europe, Cooper found that many Europeans looked down upon or simply misunderstood America. In addition, he found that many Americans admired Europe, ignoring, he felt, the dangers of aristocracy and monarchy. He wrote Notions of the Americans (1827) in order to correct European misconceptions of America, and a series of novels, most notably, The Bravo (1831), in which he attempted to realistically document European society; but when Cooper returned to America in 1833, he found that America had changed. The rise of Jacksonian democracy, emphasizing, in Cooper’s view, individualism and commercial gain, threatened the values America had been founded on. In the novels Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838) Cooper commented on what he saw as the decay of democratic virtue.

Return to Leatherstocking. Cooper’s critiques of America were not well received, and his difficulties increased as he found himself embroiled in a series of libel suits and a dispute between New York tenant farmers and landlords. Despite these distractions, Cooper was able to return to the saga of Leatherstocking. In 1840 he published The Pathfinder, and in 1841, The Deerslayer, which echoed Cooper’s earlier critiques of American democracy. Set again near Lake Otsego at the time of Natty’s youth, before the settlement of Judge Temple, the “soothing … holy calm” of nature is threatened by lawless and economically motivated settlers. Again, Natty embodies simple competence and virtue. As we know from the other novels, Lake Otsego will continue to develop, and Natty and his Indian companion, Chingach-gook, will be pushed further and further into the wilderness. As one critic has put it, the character of Natty Bumppo remains, “an embodied conscience for America.” Cooper died in 1851, but his explorations of the conflicts between civilization and freedom, law and nature, would be played out repeatedly in Western literature. His novels would be criticized by Timothy Flint, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain (in his famous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”) as unrealistic and inaccurate. Nevertheless, the character of Leatherstocking, blending the man of action with the man of natural philosophy, was tremendously influential. As the literary historian Richard Slotkin has pointed out, the figure of the white hunter accompanied by an Indian companion became an essential pairing in American literature and popular culture, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Further, as Slotkin writes, “the image of the American hero as a man armed and solitary, plebian but worthy somehow of nobility … seeking in action his heart’s desire” continues through Melville’s Ahab, Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, and the hard-boiled detective, such as Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer, who tells a woman in The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1969), “My real name is Natty Bumppo…. He’s a character in a book. He was a great man and a great tracker … I can shoot a rifle, but as for tracking, I do my best work in cities.”

Sources

Donald Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (Boston: Twayne, 1988);

Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985);

Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).