Cooper, James Fenimore

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851), novelist.Brought up in Cooperstown, New York, a pioneer settlement presided over by his father, Cooper was thirty when he published his first novel, Precaution (1820). That it seemed English to its readers offers a gauge to Cooper's larger significance: In 1820, Americans tended to associate literature exclusively with the Old World. His second novel, The Spy (1821), was aggressively American and a popular success. This tale of the Revolutionary War launched a career that produced thirty more novels as well as histories and travel books.

America's first professional novelist, Cooper helped prove that America could sustain an imaginative writer, both economically and aesthetically. Although his work relied on conventions established by British writers, especially Sir Walter Scott, he created American scenes and characters, dramatized the nation's history, and embodied what he took to be republican principles. During the 1820s and 1830s, he was one of the world's best‐selling writers. He largely invented the genre of sea fiction. Ten of his novels describe settling the continent; these often explore the moral and political conflicts that arose from the imposition of the forms of European civilization on the New World wilderness and the Native Americans. Cooper's greatest achievement was the Leather‐Stocking series: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). The hero of these tales is Natty Bumppo, hunter, scout, and warrior of the wilderness. Accompanied by his Delaware friend Chingachgook, Natty became one of the nation's first and most enduring mythic archetypes.
See also Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras.

Bibliography

James Grossman , James Fenimore Cooper, 1949.

Stephen Railton