James Fenimore Cooper
(1789-1851)
James Fenimore Cooper was the first American novelist to gain
international stature and the first to earn his living from royalties. A
prodigious innovator, he has been credited with inventing sea fiction (Melville
and Conrad expressed their indebtedness), the international novel, and
distinctively American forms of the novel of manners and allegorical fiction.
Cooper’s thirty-two novels, spanning the period from 1820 to 1850, include works
in all these genres. But, as Cooper himself knew, the novels for which he would
be best remembered are his five Leather-stocking tales. In these tales, Cooper
explored the meanings of American frontier experience, creating the
prototypical Western hero, Natty Bumppo (the Leather-stocking), whose
wilderness adventures dramatize some of the central cultural tensions of
antebellum America.
The writer was the son
of one of the early republic’s most ambitious land speculators and developers,
William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown in central New York State and later a
U.S. congressman from that region. William Cooper, having struggled to surmount
his lowly beginnings as a Philadelphia wheelwright, expected his sons to assume
a place among America’s Federalist gentry as lawyers, politicians, or gentleman
farmers. Thus, James Fenimore Cooper seems an unlikely figure to have become a
novelist. Indeed, he did not become one until he was thirty years old, after
serving briefly in the merchant marine and the U.S. Navy and then living as a
gentleman farmer in New York’s Westchester County and in Cooperstown.
But during this period
the vast real estate empire of William Cooper, who died in 1809, collapsed
under the claims of creditors. By 1820, James Cooper (he added the Fenimore
later) was the family’s only surviving son and thus the primary bearer of its
rapidly accumulating indebtedness. Although Cooper may not have become a writer
in order to gain solvency (family legend has it that he wrote his first novel
in response to a dare from his wife), his literary career, once undertaken, was
driven by both creative passion and financial necessity.
That career began in
1820 with Precaution, an unsuccessful and imitative novel of manners set
in England and published anonymously. But in the following year, Cooper found
his form and his audience with The Spy. In this bestseller, set in the
Hudson River highlands above New York City during the American Revolution, the
novelist exploited the immense appeal of American history, characters, and
settings during a time when the Revolutionary era and its leaders had become a
subject for reverence and nostalgia.
While The Spy established
Cooper’s reputation as a novelist, his next work, The Pioneers, published
in 1823, more directly reveals his family legacy and his concerns for American
life. In this first of the Leather-stocking tales, Cooper depicted the frontier
settlement of Cooperstown, situated at the foot of Lake Otsego and called
Templeton in the novel, as he remembered it from his childhood. (Born in New
Jersey in 1789, Cooper was brought to Cooperstown in the first year of his
life.) At the center of the novel, which probes the issue of rightful land
ownership and use, stands Judge Marmaduke Temple—clearly a representation of
William Cooper, the patriarchal founder and developer of Cooperstown.
The novel is organized
around the perspectives of the land’s historical claimants: old Indian John
(Chingachgook), the last survivor of Native American life in the region; the
seventy-year-old woodsman Natty Bumppo, whose spiritual claims to a free
wilderness life long predate the property claims of Judge Temple; Oliver
Effingham (known as Edwards for much of the novel), a descendant of an
aristocratic Tory family dispossessed by the Revolution, who believes that
Temple usurped his family’s rights; and the multi-ethnic group of settlers
attempting to secure their own more limited forms of land tenure. Although
Temple ultimately is exonerated from the charge of usurpation, Cooper’s ambivalence
toward the authority of the patriarch—the novel both shores up such authority
and undercuts it—is an interesting and energizing aspect of this novel and of
the Leather-stocking tales as a whole.
After his publication
of The Pioneers, Cooper went on
in the following year to repeat the success of The Spy. The Pilot, one
of whose central characters is John Paul Jones, is regarded by many literary
historians as the first authentic novel of the sea.
Shortly thereafter, in
1826, Cooper published the second of the Leather-stocking tales, The Last of
the Mohicans, set during the French and Indian War when Natty Bumppo was in
vigorous middle age. This novel is centrally concerned with the issue of Indian
dispossession and with the conflict of cultures. The fast-paced action and
elegiac portrayal of Native Americans made this work an enormous success with
the reading public. Cooper’s sympathetic and epic treatment of Native Americans
in The Last of the Mohicans has been viewed in our time in two distinct
ways: as a romantic strategy for dismissing Native Americans from national
experience and as Cooper’s authentic identification with and sympathy for
Native American dispossession. These views, while opposing, are in fact not
mutually exclusive and suggest the complexity of Cooper’s literary legacy.
Soon after publication
of The Last of the Mohicans in 1826, Cooper, now a national hero, left
America for a European sojourn of seven years. In 1827 he published from Paris
what he must have thought was the concluding volume in the Leather-stocking
series, The Prairie. In this novel, Natty Bumppo has become a fully
mythic figure leading the nation’s westward movement.
When Cooper returned
to America from Europe in 1833, resuming residence in Cooperstown, he was shocked
by what he regarded as the excesses of Jacksonian democracy, and from this
point forward until the end of his life he waged an insistent argument—in his
writings and in lawsuits (mostly against newspaper editors he believed had
libeled him)—with his country. During the 1830s, in fact, Cooper published
little fiction. Then, surprisingly, in the early 1840s, he brought the
Leather-stocking hero back to life in two novels, The Pathfinder (1840)
and The Deerslayer (1841) and thereby revived his own languishing
career. In their more classical depiction of the American wilderness, these
novels reflect an altered sense of landscape that Cooper had derived from his
European travels. The Deerslayer, set like The Pioneers at Lake
Otsego but in a much earlier time (Natty here is a youth of twenty), renders a
particularly serene and classical picture of the American forest prior to
settlement.
Later in the 1840s
Cooper resumed his overt polemical attack on his enemies in a series of novels
called the Littlepage Trilogy. In these works, he became the defender of
landowners in the Hudson River Valley, taking their side against rebellious
tenant farmers in the so-called anti-rent wars of this period. Cooper’s late
novel The Crater (1848), an allegory of the rise and fall of the United
States, confirms the novelist’s ever-deepening sense of historical doom. He
ended his career with a bitter satire about American social life and legal
practices called The Ways of the Hour (1850).
Through the course of
his long career, Cooper explored in his fiction some of nineteenth-century
America’s most important issues, especially the role of elites in a democracy
and the conflicting meanings of frontier experience. That experience was
embodied and made mythic in Cooper’s Leather-stocking hero, one of the most
enduring and influential figures in American literature. Though many of
Cooper’s works are unread today, he was regarded throughout much of the
nineteenth century as America’s preeminent novelist, and in our own time his
works are being vigorously reexamined as expressions of a troubled and
ambivalent response to democratic culture.
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