James Fenimore Cooper
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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, which many consider to be his masterpiece.

Literary career

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Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, and later settled in Scarsdale, Westchester County, New York and anonymously published his first book, Precaution (1820). He soon issued several others: The Spy (1821); The Pioneers (1823), the first of the Leatherstocking series; and The Pilot (1824); Lionel Lincoln (1825) ; Last of the Mohicans (1826), a book that is considered by many to be Cooper's masterpiece. The book was written in a second-story storefront-apartment in Warrensburg, New York, just north of where most of the book's plot takes place. Leaving America for Europe Cooper published in Paris The Prairie (1826) and The Red Rover (1828).

These novels were succeeded by: The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829); by The Notions of a Traveling Bachelor (1828); and by The Waterwitch (1830), one of his many sea-stories. In 1830 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 appears not only to have fortified him in his own convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of elucidating them for the public through the medium of his art. His next three novels, The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832) and The Headsman: or the Abbaye of Vigneron (1833), were expressions of Cooper's republican convictions. 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 The Monikins (1835) and The American Democrat (1835); with several sets of notes on his travels and experiences in Europe, among which may be remarked his England (1837), in three volumes, and with Homeward Bound and Home as Found (1838), notable as containing a highly idealized portrait of himself.

All these books tended to increase the ill feeling between author and public; the Whig press was virulent and scandalous in its comments, and Cooper plunged into a series of actions for libel. Victorious in all of them, he returned to his old occupation with something of his original vigor and success. A History of the Navy of the United States (1839), supplemented (1846) by a set of Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, was succeeded by The Pathfinder (1840), a good "Leatherstocking" novel; by Mercedes of Castile (1840); The Deerslayer (1841); by The Two Admirals and by Wing and Wing (1842); by Wyandotte, The History of a Pocket Handkerchief, and Ned Myers (1843); and by Afloat and Ashore, or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford (1844).

Later life

Photograph by Mathew Brady c.1850

He turned again from pure fiction to the combination of art and controversy in which he had achieved distinction, and in the two Littlepage Manuscripts (1845—1846) he wrote with a great deal of vigour. His next novel was The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak (1847), in which he attempted to introduce supernatural machinery; and this was succeeded by Oak Openings, The Two Admirals, and Jack Tier (1848), the latter a curious rifacimento of The Red Rover; by The Sea Lions (1849); and finally by The Ways of the Hour (1850), another title with a purpose, and his last completed novel.

Cooper spent the last years of his life in Cooperstown, New York (named for his father). He died of dropsy on September 14, 1851, a day before his 62nd birthday - and a statue was later erected in his honour. His interment was located at its Christ Episcopal Churchyard where his father William Cooper was buried.

Legacy and criticism

Statue in Cooperstown, New York.

Cooper was certainly one of the most popular 19th century American authors. Cooper's 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. His stories have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe and into some of those of Asia. Balzac admired him greatly, but with discrimination. Cooper's work has greatly influenced J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Elves have many elements of Cooper's portraits of noble Native Americans, while some passages -- like the journey down the river Anduin in The Two Towers -- read like passages from The Last of the Mohicans.

Though many scholars dispute Cooper being classified as a Romantic (he predates the movement), Victor Hugo pronounced him greater than the great master of modern romance, and this verdict was echoed by a multitude of less famous readers, who were satisfied with no title for their favorite less than that of “the American Scott.” As a satirist and observer he is simply the “Cooper who's written six volumes to prove he's as good as a Lord” of Lowell's clever portrait; his enormous vanity and his irritability find vent in a sort of dull violence, which is exceedingly tiresome. He was most memorably criticized by Mark Twain whose vicious and amusing "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" is still read widely in academic circles.

Cooper was criticized heavily for his depiction of women characters in his work. Contemporary critic James Russell Lowell referred to it poetically: "...the women he draws from one model don't vary, / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie."^[1]

Cooper's writings

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Sources for this table include:

• http://www.oneonta.edu/external/cooper/bibliography/works.html
• http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jfcooper.htm
• http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl310/cooper.htm
• http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/c#a483

See also

United States Navy portal

References

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

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007)

• 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
• "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895), by Mark Twain.
• 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

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James Fenimore Cooper

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James Fenimore Cooper

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James Fenimore Cooper

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