James Fenimore Cooper

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Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was the first major American writer todeal 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.

(1789-1851), novelist and historian. Son of a Federalist judge, Cooper was expelled from Yale for a dangerous prank. He then joined the navy but resigned his commission to marry. He converted to Jeffersonian principles, but then tried to live as an eighteenth-century gentleman while the fevers of Jacksonian democracy swept the land. At the height of his popularity as a novelist, he took his family to Europe, and during his seven-year stay, he wrote a fascinating assessment of his native land, Notions of the Americans (1829), and gathered the materials for four travel books. A Letter to His Countrymen (1834) was a bitter attack on American provincialism. Upon his return in 1833 he retreated to Cooperstown and plunged into a series of lawsuits designed to force the townspeople to respect the sanctity of private property and truth in journalism. The American Democrat (1838), designed as a textbook for high school students, lectured Americans on their political and social responsibilities.

By the time of his death Cooper had developed an international reputation as America's "national novelist," but he was also a keen observer of the political and cultural life of his nation, an accomplished controversialist, and a fine naval historian. His studies of naval history included The History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), The Cruise of the Somers (1844), and Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846).

But it is for his fiction that Cooper is best known, especially for the mythic sweep and power of his five Leatherstocking novels (The Pioneers, 1823, The Last of the Mohicans, 1826, The Prairie, 1827, The Pathfinder, 1840, and The Deerslayer, 1841). The Leatherstocking series represents, in D. H. Lawrence's words, "a decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty," but all his novels engaged historical themes and helped to form the popular sense of American history and romantic historiography in the nineteenth century.

In his second novel, The Spy (1821), Cooper adapted the historical romance of Sir Walter Scott to an array of themes suggested by the American Revolution: the legitimacy of the rebellion, the enfeebling arrogance of British officers, the random violence of paramilitary groups of self-proclaimed patriots, the patriarchal benevolence of Washington as the "father of his country," and the cultural centrality of the outcast spy of the title, Harvey Birch. It was an immediate success and, together with Washington Irving's The Sketch Book (1820) and William Cullen Bryant's Poems (1821), was cited as evidence that American culture had begun to produce a worthwhile democratic art.

For his next novel, The Pioneers, he drew on his experience growing up in the frontier village of Cooperstown to investigate what it meant to inherit the American history of conflict over possession of the landscape, setting the claims of Native Americans, British Loyalists, American Patriots, roaming hunters, and forest-clearing farmers against each other. If the novel wistfully resolves all these conflicts in the marriage of the children of all the contending parties, it nevertheless succeeds brilliantly as a thoroughly American fiction, not least in its invention of the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Cooper's essential American hero. Other novels similarly (and sometimes as successfully) engaged American history. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) was set in Connecticut in the period of King Philip's War; the "Littlepage Trilogy" (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins, 1845-1846) chronicled events of the Anti-Rent Wars in New York (1839-1846) virtually as they occurred.

The weaknesses of Cooper's fiction are famous. James Russell Lowell called attention to Cooper's undemocratic class consciousness and to the limitations of his female characters: "And the women he draws from one model don't vary, / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie." Mark Twain hilariously skewered the excesses of Cooper's romanticism in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895). Moreover, all his fictions reflect Cooper's didactic concern to educate his audience in the requirements of democracy, and he could be oppressively schoolmasterish. But his characters (including women) are often more richly developed than is usually recognized and compose a remarkable gallery of American types. The novels also constitute a record of American life and society and at their best present a richness, depth, and complexity that was unsurpassed in American fiction before the works of Hawthorne and Melville.

Bibliography:

James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 6 vols. (1960-1968); John P. McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (1972).

Author:

James D. Wallace

See also Literature.

Quotes:

"The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity."

"The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other."

"Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery."

"Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being, as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner."

"The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society."

"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

See more famous quotes by James F. Cooper

For other persons named James Cooper, see James Cooper (disambiguation).

James Fenimore Cooper
Portrait by John Wesley Jarvis
Born	September 15, 1789(1789-09-15) Burlington, New Jersey
Died	September 14, 1851 (aged 61) Cooperstown, New York
Occupation	Novelist
Genres	Historical Fiction
Literary movement	Colonial Realism
Notable work(s)	The Last of the Mohicans

James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

Contents 1 Life and work 1.1 Early life 1.2 Writings 1.3 Reaction 1.4 Later life 2 Legacy and criticism 3 References 4 External links

Life and work

Early life

Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, the son of William and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper. His father was a United States Congressman. Shortly after his first birthday, his family moved to Cooperstown, New York.

At 13, Cooper was enrolled at Yale, but he did not obtain a degree. He obtained work as a sailor on a merchant vessel, and at 18, Cooper joined the United States Navy. He obtained the rank of midshipman before leaving in 1811.

At age 21, he married Susan DeLancey. They had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. The writer Paul Fenimore Cooper was a great-grandson.

Writings

Further information: List of James Fenimore Cooper writings

See also: Category:Novels by James Fenimore Cooper

He anonymously published his first book, Precaution (1820). He soon issued several others. In 1823, he published The Pioneers; this was the first of the Leatherstocking series, featuring Natty Bumppo, the resourceful American woodsman at home with the Delaware Indians and especially their chief Chingachgook. Cooper's most famous novel, Last of the Mohicans (1826), became one of the most widely read American novels of the nineteenth century. The book was written in New York City, where Cooper and his family lived from 1822 to 1826.

In 1826 Cooper moved his family to Europe, where he sought to gain more income from his books as well as provide better education for his children. While overseas he continued to write. His books published in Paris include The Red Rover, and The Water Witch—two of his many sea stories.

In 1832 he entered the lists as a party writer; in a series of letters to the National, a Parisian journal, he defended the United States against a string of charges brought against them by the Revue Britannique. For the rest of his life he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and not infrequently for both at once.

This opportunity to make a political confession of faith reflected the political turn he already had taken in his fiction, having attacked European anti-republicanism in The Bravo (1831). Cooper continued this political course in The Heidenmauer (1832) and The Headsman: or the Abbaye of Vigneron (1833). The Bravo depicted Venice as a place where a ruthless oligarchy lurks behind the mask of the "serene republic." All were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, though The Bravo was a critical failure in the United States.^[1]

In 1833 Cooper returned to America and immediately published A Letter to My Countrymen, in which he gave his own version of the controversy in which he had been engaged and sharply censured his compatriots for their share in it. This attack he followed up with novels and several sets of notes on his travels and experiences in Europe. His Homeward Bound and Home as Found are notable for containing a highly idealized portrait of himself.

Reaction

Photograph by Mathew Brady c.1850

All these books touching upon the topics of politics and of Cooper himself tended to increase the ill feeling between author and public. The Whig press was particularly virulent in its comments, and Cooper plunged into a series of actions for libel. He emerged victorious in all his lawsuits.

After concluding his last case in court, Cooper returned to writing with more energy and success than he had had for several years. He wrote a history of the US Navy, and then returned to the Leatherstocking series with The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) and other novels. He then returned to writing on maritime themes, including Ned Myers (Or) A Life Before the Mast, which is of particular interest to naval historians.

Later life

He turned again from pure fiction to the combination of art and controversy in which he had achieved distinction with the Littlepage Manuscripts (1845—1846). His next novel was The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak (1847), in which he attempted to introduce supernatural machinery. Jack Tier (1848) was a rifacimento of The Red Rover, and The Ways of the Hour was his last completed novel.

James Fenimore Cooper became a believer in spiritualism, he was an attender at spirit circles. [[2]]

Cooper spent the last years of his life in Cooperstown, New York (named for his father). He died of dropsy on September 14, 1851, the day before his 62nd birthday. His interment was located at its Christ Episcopal Churchyard, where his father William Cooper was buried. Several well-known writers, politicians, and other public figures honored Cooper's memory with a dinner in February 1852; Washington Irving served as a co-chairman for the event alongside William Cullen Bryant and Daniel Webster.^[2]

Legacy and criticism

Statue in Cooperstown, New York.

Cooper was one of the most popular 19th century American authors, and his work was admired greatly throughout the world. While on his death bed, the Austrian composer Franz Schubert became an avid reader of Cooper's novels^{[citation needed]}. Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist and playwright, admired him greatly^{[citation needed]}. Cooper's stories have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe and into some of those of Asia.

Though some scholars may dispute Cooper being classified as a Romantic, Victor Hugo pronounced him greater than the great master of modern romance^{[citation needed]}, and this verdict was echoed by a multitude of less famous readers^[who?], who were satisfied with no title for their favorite less than that of the "American Scott.”^{[citation needed]} He was most memorably criticized by Mark Twain whose vicious and amusing review ^[3] is still read widely in academic circles. His reputation today rests upon the five Leatherstocking tales and some of the maritime stories. His presentation of race relations and native Americans has generated much comment, not all of it sympathetic.^{[citation needed]}

Cooper was also criticized heavily for his depiction of women characters in his work. James Russell Lowell, Cooper's contemporary and a critic, referred to it poetically in A Fable for Critics, writing, ". . . the women he draws from one model don't vary / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie."^[4]

United States Navy portal

Three dining halls at the State University of New York at Oswego are named in Cooper's remembrance (Cooper Hall, The Pathfinder, and Littlepage) because of his temporary residence in Oswego and for setting some of his works there. ^[5]

References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Jones, Brian Jay. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008: 391. ISBN 978-1-55970836-4
3. ^ http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"
4. ^ Porte, Joel. The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969: 20.
5. ^ http://www.oswego.edu/library/resources/buildings.html

• The Cambridge History of American Literature, Book II, Chapter VI, Fiction I: Brown, Cooper
• James Fenimore Cooper at Find a Grave Retrieved on 2008-03-31
• James Fenimore Cooper Society Website
• Essay on Fenimore Cooper: Works in biographical/historical context
• Thomas R. Lounsbury: James Fenimore Cooper. 6th Edition. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886 (American Men of Letters). PDF from the Arno Schmidt Reference Library

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: James Fenimore Cooper

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: James Fenimore Cooper

Wikisource has original works written by or about: James Fenimore Cooper

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Cooper, James Fenimore.

Sources

• Works by or about James Fenimore Cooper at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by James Fenimore Cooper at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Works by or about James Fenimore Cooper in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Other

• James Fenimore Cooper Society Homepage
• James Fenimore Cooper at the Internet Movie Database

Persondata
NAME	Cooper, James Fenimore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	September 15, 1789
PLACE OF BIRTH	Burlington, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH	September 14, 1851
PLACE OF DEATH	Cooperstown, New York

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