James Fenimore Cooper was a pioneer of American literature. The first
writer in the newly formed United States to make a living solely by his
pen, he established some of the most important early American literary
themes.
Early years
Cooper was born on September 15, 1789. His family was of old Quaker
stock. His mother was an heiress, and his father used her wealth to purchase thousands of acres of land near Otsego Lake in central New York
to develop into farm parcels. He sold these to immigrants flooding into
the country. When Cooper was fourteen months old, the family moved
to the settlement near Otsego Lake named Cooperstown in his father’s
honor.
The Cooper family lived a privileged life in a fine brick mansion.
Cooper’s father became a judge and a U.S. representative. Cooper spent
many of his early years in the wild, playing and exploring in the deep
woods surrounding his home. At age eleven, he was sent to boarding
school in Albany, and at age thirteen, he entered Yale College. He was a
mischievous young boy and got expelled from Yale after two years for
blowing in another boy’s door with gunpowder.
After Yale, Cooper joined the crew of a merchant ship, beginning a
career as a seaman. He had risen to the position of midshipman in the
navy in 1809 when his father died. Cooper inherited a share in his father’s large estate and took up the life of a gentleman farmer. He married in 1811. For the next decade, Cooper and his growing family lived mostly on
a farm in Westchester County. There was no hint of the writer’s life that
was soon to come. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, the worth of
the Cooper estate dwindled. By 1819, Cooper’s mother and brothers
were dead. Their debts, and in some cases the welfare of their offspring,
had been left to Cooper.
First writing attempt
In 1819 or early 1820, Cooper decided to try his hand at writing and
self-published his first novel, Precaution, which was English in style and
subject matter. It was mostly ignored in the United States and had modest sales in England. Cooper’s second novel, The Spy (1821), was based
on a true account of the exploits of a peddler who served General
George Washington (1732–1799) behind the lines during the
American Revolution (1775–83). The Spy is considered one of the first
truly American novels, and it established Cooper overnight as an important novelist. Royalties from the popular book saved him from bankruptcy.
Introducing Leatherstockings
Cooper moved his family to New York City, then a town of about
100,000 inhabitants. His third novel, The Pioneers, came out in 1823
and was the first of what became known as his Leatherstocking Tales.
The Pioneers takes place sometime around 1793 and is set near Otsego
Lake in a place strikingly similar to Cooper’s childhood home. Its protagonist, Natty Bumppo, nicknamed Leatherstocking because of the way
he dressed, is an old scout and hunter who despises the ways of civilization and the destruction it entails, such as the leveling of forests for farm
land and the slaughter of wildlife. Cooper, early on, had found one of his
most important themes: the settling of the continent and the costs of
such settlement.
After writing less successful novels on different themes, Cooper returned to his popular character, Natty Bumppo. In The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), Cooper portrays the hero in his earlier years as a scout
during the French and Indian War (1754–63). In his next novel, The
Prairie (1827), Leatherstocking appears in his old age as a fur trapper,
living in the remote regions west of the Mississippi, beyond the corrupting influences of civilization. The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie were grounded in a view of
the forest as the site of heroism and wisdom. The various Indians in the
Leatherstocking books were never, even by Cooper himself, considered
realistic. They always stood as symbolic figures, creatures of the wild
standing in opposition to the non-Indian creatures of civilization.
Writing in Europe
Cooper took his family to Paris in 1826, where he wrote The Prairie, The
Red Rover (1828), considered one of his best sea tales, and The WaterWitch (1830), another sea story. Cooper’s attentions then turned to more
political matters. He wrote his first nonfiction book, Notions of the
Americans, a strong defense of American democracy intended primarily
for the aristocratic-minded British reading public. Cooper’s subsequent
novels concerning European politics in the early 1830s were unpopular
at home, with poor reviews and even poorer sales.
Return to Leatherstocking
In 1840, Cooper brought back Natty Bumppo as a young man for a new
novel, The Pathfinder, in which Leatherstocking fails to win the girl of
his choice. He surrenders her to another man with good grace, a sign that
he is married to his wilderness. In 1841, Cooper penned the final
Leatherstocking tale, The Deerslayer, in which Natty finds himself with
human blood on his blameless hands for the first time. Once again, the
Leatherstocking tales brought Cooper a large and grateful readership.
Cooper continued to write to the very end of his life, but his popularity faded. Increasingly, Cooper placed himself on the side of the
wealthy elite, and critics agree that he had lost touch with the magical
wilderness setting that had once stimulated his imagination.
Legacy
There was basically no such thing as American literature when Cooper
began writing. By the time of his death in 1851, he had supplied several
of what would become major American literary themes: the cost of
progress, the ethics of expansion, or Manifest Destiny, and adventures on
the sea. Many modern critics find his writing style to be pompous and ornate, his plots far-fetched, and his facts lacking. Nonetheless, he holds a
place as one of the great American novelists of the nineteenth century.