James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

James Fenimore Cooper was born in New Jersey and soon moved to the town, which his father had laid out - Cooperstown, New York (60 miles to the east of Albany). He was brought up in a community in which the Coopers were by far the most important personages. (The members of the community built roads, bridges and canals and encouraged the development of industries). His future was from the first defined as that of the landowner and estate manager.

He had the education of the gentleman, first under a private tutor, and then in Yale College, which expelled him in 1806 for too much pleasure-seeking. Never a great reader, young Cooper was not much under the influence of books. The most of his education he got from out-door life.

After spending 5 years in the US Navy, he married Susan Augusta De Lancey. Both he and his wife had money of their own, and there was more in prospect. They had seven children.

In 1819, at the age of 30, Cooper was a gentleman farmer with neither the ambition nor the necessity for writing. The pleasant legend is that he began his first novel after being challenged by his wife to write a better book than the British novel he was then reading – and loudly condemning. The result “Precaution” (1820) was a bad imitation of the society novels popular at that time in England. But he had caught the writing fever he was never to lose. The next year he published “The Spy” (1821), a novel about the American Revolution, the first novel to make serious use of American history. The novel was enormously successful. The course of Cooper’s life was changed abruptly, and he began to produce a stream of books, which by the time of his death in 1851 consisted of 33 novels, numerous volumes of social comment, travel observations and a naval history.

His other novels:

- “The Pilot” (1823) and “The Red Rover” (1828) are the tales of the sea;

- “The Leatherstocking Tales”. Five novels are about one and the same hero, who appears under different names in each novel. The real name of the hero is Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo. The correct sequence of the novels is the following:

“The Deerslayer” (1841) – his early adventures with the Hurons, the hostile Indian tribe;

“The Last of the Mohicans” (1826) – Hawk Eye’s adventures with his friends Chingachgook and Uncas, his son;

“The Pathfinder” (1840) – the French and Indian wars;

“The Pioneers” (1823) – under his real name, the time after the Revolution;

“The Prairie” (1827) – under the name of Trapper.

These books portray the life of a wilderness figure, Natty Bumppo, from adolescence to his death. His life parallels America’s wilderness experience.

The novels deal with the tragic lot of the Indians. Natty Bumppo is convinced that he cannot stop the destruction of nature and the ruin of the Indians. There is certain fatalism about him in these novels.

The main concern of Fenimore Cooper was the conflict between

nature and civilization, and this gave him no peace. Fenimore Cooper gives the reader a broad panorama of his native country and the gigantic pace of its development.

James Fenimore Cooper is often called the American Walter Scott.