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James Fenimore Cooper (17891851) invented the key form...)
James Fenimore Cooper (17891851) invented the key forms of American fiction?the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain?who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his literary offenses. His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Coopers fictions traced native losses to their economic sources.
Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Coopers life to be based on full access to his family papers. Coopers life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavors, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years covers Coopers life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.
(One of the best books of all time, James Fenimore Cooper'...)
One of the best books of all time, James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. If you haven't read this classic already, then you're missing out - read The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper today!
(In this classic novel, James Fenimore Cooper portrays lif...)
In this classic novel, James Fenimore Cooper portrays life in a new settlement on New York's Lake Otsego in the closing years of the eighteenth century. He describes the year's cycle: the turkey shoot at Christmas, the tapping of maple trees, fishing for bass in the evening, the marshalling of the militia. But Cooper is also concerned with exploring the development of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the American experience. He writes of the conflicts within the settlement itself, focusing primarily on the contrast between the natural codes of the hunter and woodsman Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend John Mohegan and the more rigid structure of law needed by a more complex society. Quite possibly America's first best-seller (more than three thousand copies were sold within hours of publication), The Pioneers today evokes a vibrant and authentic picture of the American pioneering experience.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
(The Deerslayer, or The First Warpath (1841) was the last ...)
The Deerslayer, or The First Warpath (1841) was the last of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales to be written. Its 1740-1745 time period makes it the first installment chronologically and in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, Natty Bumppo. The novel's setting on Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, is the same as that of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking tales to be published (1823). The Deerslayer is considered to be the prequel to the rest of the Leatherstocking tales. Fenimore Cooper begins his work by relating the astonishing advance of civilization in New York State, which is the setting of four of his five Leatherstocking tales.
Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper 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.
Background
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.
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.
Education
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 broughtby 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.
Career
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.
Precaution was an attempt to outdo the English domestic novels Cooper had been reading, which he imitated in choice of theme, scene, and manner.
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).
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. "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Largely unread and unappreciated in their day, these five novels, especially Satanstoe, have since become recognized as Cooper's most successful fulfillment of hisintention.
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.
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.
He died on September 14, 1851, the day before 62nd birthday.
(One of the best books of all time, James Fenimore Cooper'...)
Religion
From his youth Cooper was a devoted follower of the Episcopal Church where his religious convictions deepened throughout his life. He was an active member of Christ Episcopal Church, which at the time was a small parish in Cooperstown not far from his home. Much later in his life, in 1834, he became its warden and vestryman. As the vestryman, he donated generously to this church and later supervised and redesigned its interior with oak furnishings at his own expense. In July 1851 he was confirmed in this church by the Reverend Mr. Birdsall.
Politics
His social and political position is succinctly summed up in The American Democrat (1838).
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.
All his 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.
Membership
Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior.
Connections
Cooper and Susan had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood.