James Fenimore Cooper

Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was the first major American writer to deal imaginatively with American life, notably in his five "Leather-Stocking Tales." He was also a critic of the political, social, and religious problems of the day.

James Cooper (his mother's family name of Fenimore was legally added in 1826) was born in Burlington, N.J., on Sept. 15, 1789, the eleventh of 12 children of William Cooper, a pioneering landowner and developer in New Jersey and New York. When James was 14 months old, his father moved the family to a vast tract of wilderness at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River in New York State where, on a system of small land grants, he had established the village of Cooperstown at the foot of Otsego Lake.

Here, in the "Manor House," later known as Otsego Hall, Cooper grew up, the privileged son of the "squire" of a primitive community. He enjoyed the amenities of a transplanted civilization while reading, in the writings of the wilderness missionary John Gottlieb Heckewelder, about the Native Americans who had long since retreated westward, and about life in the Old World in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Meanwhile, he attended the local school and Episcopal church. The lore of the wilderness learned from excursions into the surrounding forests and from local trappers and hunters, the stories of life in the great estates of neighboring Dutch patroons and English patentees, and the gossip of revolution-torn Europe brought by refugees of all classes furnished him with materials for his later novels, histories, and commentaries.

For the present, however, Cooper was a vigorous and obstreperous young man who was sent away to be educated, first by a clergyman in Albany, and then at Yale, from which he was dismissed for a student prank. His father next arranged for him to go to sea, first in a merchant vessel to England and Spain, and then in the Navy; these experiences stimulated at least a third of his later imaginative writing.

When Cooper returned to civilian life in 1811, he married Susan Augusta DeLancey of a formerly wealthy New York Tory family and established himself in Westchester County overlooking Long Island Sound, a gentleman farmer involved in the local militia, Agricultural Society, and Episcopal church. It was here, at the age of 30, that he published his first novel, written on a challenge from his wife.

First Period of His Literary Career

Precaution was an attempt to outdo the English domestic novels Cooper had been reading, which he imitated in choice of theme, scene, and manner. But he soon realized his mistake, and the next year, in The Spy, he deliberately attempted to correct it by choosing the American Revolution for subject, the country around New York City he knew so well for scene, and the historical romance of Scott for model. Thereafter, although many of his novels combined the novel of manners with the historical romance, as well as with other currently popular fictional modes, he never again departed from his concern for American facts and opinions, even though for some of his tales he chose, in the spirit of comparative analysis, scenes in foreign lands and waters.

All of the novels of the first period of Cooper's literary career (1820-1828) were as experimental as the first two. Three dealt with the frontier and Native American life (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Prairie), three with the sea (The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Water Witch), and three with American history (The Spy, Lionel Lincoln, and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish).

Discovering the "American Problem"

The success of his first America-oriented novel convinced Cooper that he was on the right track, and he decided to turn to his childhood memories for a truthful, if not wholly literal, tale of life on the frontier: The Pioneers (1823). Judge Temple in the novel is Judge Cooper, and Templeton is Cooperstown; and originals for most of the characters can be identified, as can the scenes and much of the action, although all of it is given what Cooper called "a poetical view of the subject." Though the traditional novel of manners deals realistically with a group of people in a closed and stable community using an agreed-upon code of social ethics, Cooper tried to adapt this form to a fluid and open society, thereby illuminating the core of the "American problem": how could the original trio of "unalienable rights"—life, liberty, and property (not, as Jefferson had it, the pursuit of happiness)—be applied to a society in which the rights of the Native American possessors of the land were denied by the civilized conqueror who took it from them for his own profit, thus defying the basic Christian ethic of individual integrity and brotherly love?

Natty Bumppo (or Leather-Stocking as he is called in the series as a whole) is neither the "natural man" nor the "civilized man" of European theorists such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau; he is the American individualist who is creating a new society by a code of personal fulfillment under sound moral self-guidance, improvising as he goes along. In The Pioneers Natty is a somewhat crotchety old man whose chief "gift" is his ability to argue his rights with both Indian John and Judge Temple. The central theme which knits this complex web of people and adventures into the cycle of a single year is the emergence of Leather-Stocking as the "American hero."

At this point Cooper was feeling his way toward a definition of his social concern, but in the novel itself the problem is almost submerged in the excitement, action, and vivid description and narrative. In the next of the Leather-Stocking series, The Last of the Mohicans, Natty is younger and the romantic story line takes over, making it the most popular of all Cooper's novels. In The Prairie Natty in his last days becomes a tragic figure driven west, into the setting sun, in a futile search for his ideal way of life. To most of Cooper's readers these stories are pure romances of adventure, and their social significance is easily overlooked.

In The Pilot (1824) Cooper was drawn to the sea by what he felt was Scott's mishandling of the subject, and he thus discovered a whole second world in which to explore his moral problem. The American hero, John Paul Jones, like other patriots of the time, is in revolt against the authority of the English king, and yet, in his own empire of the ship, he is forced by the dangers of the elements to exert an even more arbitrary authority over his crew. There is a similar problem in The Red Rover, the story of a pirate with a Robin Hood complex, and in The Water-Witch, a tale of a gentleman-rogue, which is less successful because Cooper turned from the technique of straight romantic narrative to that of symbolism.

Cooper's two historical novels of the period (other than The Spy), Lionel Lincoln and The Wept of Wishton-Wish, are set in New England, where Cooper was never at home. The former, although thoroughly researched, is trivial, but in the latter, in spite of lack of sympathy, Cooper made a profound study of the conflict between Puritan morality and integrity and the savage ethic of the frontier.

Second Period

His reputation as a popular novelist established, Cooper went abroad in 1826 to arrange for the translation and foreign publication of his works and to give his family the advantages of European residence and travel. He stayed 7 years, during which he completed two more romances, but thereafter, until 1840, he devoted most of his energy to political and social criticism—both in fiction and in nonfiction. Irritated by the criticisms of English travelers in America, in 1828 he wrote a defense of American life and institutions in a mock travel book, Notions of the Americans Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor.

Settling his children in a convent school in Paris, he traveled from London to Sorrento, Italy, and also stayed in Switzerland, Germany, France, and England. Europe was astir with reform and revolutionary movements, and the outspoken Cooper was drawn into close friendships with the Marquis de Lafayette and other liberal leaders. One product of this interest was a trio of novels on European political themes (The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman), but the American press was so hostile to them that Cooper finally declared, in his 1834 A Letter to His Countrymen, that he would write no more fiction.

This resolution, however, lasted only long enough to produce five volumes of epistolary travel essay and commentary on Europe (Gleanings in Europe and Sketches of Switzerland ); The Monikins, a Swiftean political allegory; and various works on the American Navy, including a definitive two-volume history, a volume of biographies of naval officers, and miscellaneous tracts.

In 1833 Cooper returned to America, renovated Otsego Hall in Cooperstown, and settled his family there for the rest of his life. There is much autobiography in the pair of novels Homeward Bound and Home as Found (1838), in which he reversed himself to attack the people and institutions of his own land with the same keen critical insight that he had applied to Europe. One reason for this was that a series of libel suits against Whig editors helped personalize his quarrel with the equalitarian and leveling tendencies of the Jacksonian era. He won the suits but lost many friends and much of his reading public. His social and political position is succinctly summed up in The American Democrat (1838).

Third Period

The third period of Cooper's literary career began in 1840-1841 with his return to the Leather-Stocking series and two more chapters in the life of Natty Bumppo, The Pathfinder, in which Cooper used his own experiences on Lake Ontario during the War of 1812, and The Deerslayer, which fills in the young manhood of his hero. These romances were followed by equally vigorous tales of the sea, The Two Admirals and Wing-and-Wing.

But the most significant development of this period was Cooper's final success in blending the romantic novel of action and the open spaces with the novel of manners and social concern. Returning for subject to the scenes of his first interest, the estates and villages of early upstate New York (with their mixed population of Dutch patroons, English patentees, small farmers and woodsmen, and variegated adventurers carving out civilization in a wilderness peopled by Native Americans and rife with unexploited wildlife of all kinds), he wrote five novels in two series: Afloat and Ashore (1844) and its sequel, Miles Wallingford, and the "Littlepage Manuscripts" (1845-1846), depicting in a trilogy (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins) the four-generation history of a landed family from their first days of settlement to the days of the disintegration of their privileged way of life in the face of rampant, classless democracy. Largely unread and unappreciated in their day, these five novels, especially Satanstoe, have since become recognized as Cooper's most successful fulfillment of his intention. He had always wished to write a chronicle of his times in fictional form in order to interpret for his countrymen and the world at large the deeper meanings of the "American experiment" in its formative years.

Meanwhile, Cooper's concerns for individual and social integrity and for change had hardened into moral and religious absolutes, and the novels of his last 4 years were less story and more allegory. The best of these, The Crater (1847), succeeds where The Water-Witch and The Monikins failed, in using symbolism to convey a narrative message.

Cooper's Achievement

The power and persistence of this first major American author in attempting a total imaginative redaction of American life, coupled with an equal skill in the description of place and the depiction of action, overcame the liabilities of both the heavy romantic style current in his day and his substitution of the character type for the individual character. Appreciated first in Europe, the most action-packed of his novels survived the eclipse of his reputation as a serious literary artist (brought about through attacks on his stormy personality and unpopular social ideas) and have led to a restudy of the whole of his work in recent years. In this process Cooper has been restored to his rightful place as the first major American man of letters.

Further Reading

Probably the most satisfactory short biography of Cooper is James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (1949), although Donald A. Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (1962), gives fuller critical treatment of Cooper's works, and Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (1931), provides more background analysis of Cooper's social ideas. None of these biographers had the advantage of James F. Beard, who edited The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (6 vols., 1960-1968), and a new biography is needed. □

Cooper, James Fenimore (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 toward 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 over to a war with the people concerning property rights, in which, although he was consistently 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 Myers (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 perversion 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 depiction 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, between society and the individual, between the settlement and the wilderness, and between civil law and natural rights as these suggest issues of moral and mythic import.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

Sources

Novelist

Finding a Career. James Cooper (he would add Fenimore, his mother’s name, in 1826) was the son of William Cooper, speculator and founder of Cooperstown, New York. He attended Yale College from 1803 to 1805 but was dismissed for misconduct and never graduated. In 1806 Cooper went to sea to prepare for a career in the navy; he was commissioned a midshipman in 1808 and served for three and one-half years. After a series of professional failures Cooper found his vocation in 1820 when, on a whim, he wrote his first novel, Precaution. Between 1820 and his death in 1851, Cooper turned out more than thirty novels, several travel volumes, and a political tract, American Democrat (1838). As one of the first professional authors in the United States, Cooper proved that an American could earn a living from writing; The Spy (1821) alone brought him $4, 000 in royalties in its first year of publication.

American Scenes. Influenced by the success of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances in the United States, Cooper used historically influenced narratives to make “American manners and American scenes interesting to an American reader.” The success of The Spy and The Pioneers (1823) established Cooper as the preeminent American novelist of his time. The popularity of his books abroad as well as in the United States made Cooper the man who could best challenge the scornful British question, “Who reads an American book?” Cooper’s most popular works were the novels he wrote between 1821 and 1826, including The Spy, The Pioneers, The Pilot (1824), Lionel Lincoln (1825), and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). These novels drew on the American past and centered on conflicts over land use and ownership in colonial and early republican times. Cooper’s best-known character, Natty Bumppo, known as Leatherstocking (also called Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans ), made his first appearance in The Pioneers as a white man who resisted the onslaught of American civilization and law and who wanted only to live in harmony with nature like his Indian friends.

Nature and Society. Cooper took an essentially moral view of natuie, believing it to be the gift of a beneficent God, designed for man’s use and not for man’s plunder. If Leatherstocking represented the archetypal antisocial American man resistant to culture and civilization, other characters in the novels represented the opposite extreme, the white man bent on wholesale destruction of environmental resources. By including thoughtful mediating characters, such as Judge Temple in The Pioneers, Cooper expressed hope that Americans would be able to find a balance between the demands of society on one hand and man’s moral responsibility to the American environment on the other without resorting to anarchic lawlessness.

Political Commentator. Cooper’s travels in Europe from 1826 through 1833 gave him the opportunity to evaluate American democracy in contrast to the political systems he encountered in Europe. In Notions of the Americans (1828) he defended his country’s institutions, but his sensitivity to criticism from American reviewers brought Cooper a cold reception when he returned to the United States in 1833. Shortly afterward Cooper wrote A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), which included commentary on the hostile treatment he had received from the American press. In 1838 he published American Democrat, a more serious treatment of the civil and social relations of the United States, and two novels, Home as Found and Homeward Bound, that offered considerably more-negative treatments of contemporary American life. In light of his experiences abroad and at home, Cooper intended these works to be a kind of political instruction aimed at controlling the difficulties that a democratic system brought its participants. When both novels proved to be critical failures, Cooper returned to historical romances and produced two more Leatherstocking novels, The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).

Libel. In 1837 the Whig press sharply attacked Cooper for his role in a land dispute between Cooperstown and the Cooper family, which led him to file the first of many suits against the press for libel. He included chapters devoted to the controversy in Homeward Bound and Home as Found, in response to which several newspapers used their reviews to carry the opposing side. Cooper continued to produce politically-themed novels; in 1845–1846 in response to antirent agitation in New York State, Cooper wrote the Littlepage Novels to present his prolandlord views. Cooper believed that the antirent struggle showed “decay of a sense of values in the American mind” and used the three novels to trace the history of this decay from the 1750s. But as William Cullen Bryant said in his eulogy on Cooper, “The principal effect of this [political writing], as it seemed to me, was to awaken in certain quarters a kind of resentment that a successful writer of fiction should presume to give lessons in politics.” Cooper remains best known for his popular Leatherstocking novels.

Sources

Ethel R. Outland, The “Effingham” Libels on Cooper, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 28 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1929);

Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978);

Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage, 1995).

James Fenimore Cooper 1789–1851, American novelist, b. Burlington, N.J., as James Cooper. He was the first important American writer to draw on the subjects and landscape of his native land in order to create a vivid myth of frontier life.

In 1790 Cooper's family moved to Cooperstown, N.Y., a frontier settlement founded by his father near Otsego Lake. The landscape and history of the area was to greatly influence many of his most famous works. Sent to Yale at 13, Cooper was dismissed for a disciplinary reason in his third year. Soon after he went to sea; commissioned as a U.S. midshipman, he served until 1811, at which time he married and settled into life as a gentleman farmer.

Cooper's literary career, which covers a period of 30 years and includes more than 50 publications, began in 1820 with the appearance of Precaution. Imitative of the English novel of manners, this book failed to gain an audience; but his next work, The Spy (1821), a patriotic story of the American Revolution, was an immediate success. With The Pioneers (1823), the first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales, and The Pilot (1823), an adventure of the high seas, Cooper's reputation as the first major American novelist was established.

In 1826 Cooper went to France, nominally as American consul at Lyons. He spent several years abroad, publishing such novels as The Red Rover (1827), The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), and The Water-Witch (1830), romances of American life on land and sea. In Notions of the Americans (1828) he defended his country to European critics; but upon his return home, repelled by what he saw as the abuses of American democracy, Cooper became the staunch social critic of American society. Such works as The American Democrat (1838) and the fictional Homeward Bound and its sequel, Home as Found (both 1838), express the conservative, aristocratic social views that made him quite unpopular; his later life was filled with many quarrels and lawsuits over his works.

In his most important novels, the group comprising the Leatherstocking Tales —which in order of the narrative are The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), and The Prairie (1827)—Cooper skillfully dramatized the clash between the frontier wilderness and the encroaching civilization. Named for their chief character, the forthright frontiersman Natty Bumppo, nicknamed Leatherstocking, the Leatherstocking Tales are notable for their descriptive power, their mastery of native background, and their romanticized portrayal of the Native American.

Cooper's later works include the novels Afloat and Ashore and its sequel, Miles Wallingford (both 1844), and the Littlepage trilogy— Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846)—a study of the conflict between the landholding and the propertyless classes in New York state, in which Cooper shows himself a traditional defender of the rights of property.

Cooper has been criticized for his extravagant plots, his conventional characters, and his stilted dialogue. Nevertheless, he remains the first great American novelist, a vital and original writer of romances of the wilderness and of the sea, and a harshly astute critic of the growing and stumbling American democracy.

Bibliography: See his correspondence (ed. by his grandson, J. F. Cooper, 2 vol., 1922, repr. 1971); biographical and critical studies by R. E. Spiller (1931, repr. 1963), T. R. Lounsbury (1882, repr. 1968), J. P. McWilliams, Jr. (1972), S. Railton (1978), W. Franklin (1982), and W. P. Kelly (1984); bibliography by R. E. Spiller and P. C. Blackburn (1934, repr. 1969).

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

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851), American novelist, came into prominence with his second book The Spy (1821), a stirring tale of the American revolution. The Pioneers (1823) was the first of his best-known group of novels, Leather-Stocking Tales, called after the deerskin leggings of their hero, pioneer scout Natty Bumppo (alias ‘Deerslayer’, ‘Pathfinder’ or ‘Hawkeye’); the sequels were The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). They deal with adventures of the frontier and give a vivid picture of American Indian and pioneer life.

From 1826 to 1833 Cooper travelled in Europe, and on his return appeared several highly critical accounts of European society, including England, with Sketches of Society in the Metropolis (1837) which was violently attacked in Britain, notably by Lockhart. Cooper was also deeply critical of American democracy, and expressed his conservative opinions directly in The American Democrat (1838) and fictionally in Homeward Bound and Home as Found (both 1838). Among his many other works are the scholarly The History of the Navy of the United States (1839); Satanstoe (1845), a historical novel of manners; and The Crater (1848), a Utopian social allegory.

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851) US novelist. One of the earliest American novelists and among the first to gain international recognition. His most successful works were the romantic ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ about the frontier, of which the best known are The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841). He also wrote a number of novels about life at sea, including The Pilot (1823).

http://oneonta.edu/cooper; http://www.classicbookshelf.com