(With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Res...)
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Deerslayer is the culmination of James Fenimore Cooper s Leather-Stocking novels, featuring Natty Bumppo (the deer-slaying young frontiersman) and the Mohican chief, Chingachgook. Cooper portrays the hubris of the conquest of a vast territory. The action takes place during the American wars of the 1740s. Natty and his friend Harry attempt to save a trapper and two young women, whose floating fort on Lake Glimmerglass is besieged by the ruthless Iroquois. The tension steadily increases to the point at which a cruel outcome seems inevitable. The exciting action, the romantic potentialities and the knowledgeable evocation of frontier life (with its moral and racial conflicts) have made this novel a perennial favourite. The courageous Natty, with his problematic values, has set the precedent for countless American heroes. Culturally, The Deerslayer has proved to be a powerfully influential work.
James Fenimore Cooper was an American novelist and social critic of the early 19th century.
Background
James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, United States on September 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.
Education
He attended the local school and Episcopal church. Cooper 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
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 his later imaginative writing.
At the age of 30, that he published his first novel, written on a challenge from his wife. 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.
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).
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. "
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. To most of Cooper's readers his 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 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.
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. His social and political position is succinctly summed up in The American Democrat (1838).
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.
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. The best of these, The Crater (1847), succeeds where The Water-Witch and The Monikins failed, in using symbolism to convey a narrative message.
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.
Achievements
He was the first major American writer to deal imaginatively with American life, notably in his five historical novels "Leather-Stocking Tales. " Another his significant work - romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. He was also a critic of the political, social, and religious problems of the day.
In 1831, Cooper was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. Cooper was honored on a U. S. commemorative stamp, the Famous American series, issued in 1940.
(With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Res...)
Religion
Beginning in his youth Cooper was a devoted follower of the Episcopal Church where his religious convictions deepened throughout his life. As the vestryman of Christ Episcopal Church in Cooperstown, he donated generously to this church and later supervised and redesigned its interior with oak furnishings at his own expense.
Membership
Around 1823 he became a member of the Philadelphia Philosophical Society.
Connections
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.
They had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood.
