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 romances 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.

Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on the 15th of September 1789, the twelfth of William and Elizabeth Cooper's thirteen children (most of whom died in childhood). When James was one year old, his family moved to the frontier of Otsego Lake, New York, where his father established a settlement which became modern-day Cooperstown, New York. His father was a judge and member of Congress. James was sent to school in Albany at the Albany Academy for Boys and at New Haven. He entered Yale College in 1803 as its youngest student, but was expelled in 1805, apparently for a dangerous prank involving blowing up another student's pants , as well as for stealing food.http://www2.bc.edu/~wallacej/jfc/jfcbio.html

Three years afterward he joined the United States Navy; but in 1811, after making a few voyages in a merchant vessel to perfect his seamanship and obtain his lieutenancy, he resigned. That year Cooper married Susan Augusta de Lancey (the wedding took place in Mamaroneck, New York, on New Years Day, 1811) . He had married into one of the best families in the state.

His father William died in 1809, when James was twenty years old, leaving a legacy that influenced his entire career. Almost one half of Cooper's novels are about populating the wilderness; in The Pioneers his father appears directly, as Judge Marmaduke Temple of Templeton.

Cooper settled in Scarsdale, Westchester County, New York, the “Neutral Ground” of his earliest American romance, and produced anonymously his first book, Precaution(1820), a novel of the fashionable school. This was followed by The Spy (1821), which was very successful at the date of issue; The Pioneers (1823), the first of the Leatherstocking series; and The Pilot (1824), a bold and dashing sea-story. The next was Lionel Lincoln (1825), followed in 1826 by Last of the Mohicans, 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. Quitting America for Europe he published in Paris The Prairie (1826) and The Red Rover, (1828).

At this period Cooper's talent seems to have been at its best. 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.http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/susan/susan-bravo.html

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).

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 novel with a purpose, and his last book.

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.

The five Leatherstocking novels chronicle the life of Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo, who lives in the frontier (which moves steadily westward with each successive novel) at the intersection of European and Native American culture. Bumppo is a hybrid of these cultures; in each book, he has a different Native American name, and it is by these names that he is known. These books are a lucid and insightful study of the encounter between the two cultures, from the point of view of a man who manages to straddle the divide between them.

Cooper spent the last years of his life in Cooperstown, New York (named for his father). He died of dropsy on September 14, 1851 and a statue was later erected in his honor.

Cooper was certainly one of the most popular 19th century American authors. 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; 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 favourite 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 criticised by Mark Twain whose vicious and amusing "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" is still read widely in academic circles.

Sources for this table include: * http://www.oneonta.edu/external/cooper/bibliography/works.html * http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jfcooper.htm * http://www.jamesfenimorecooper.com/ * http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl310/cooper.htm * http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/c

*The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 1, Blake Nevius, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1985) ISBN 978-0-94045020-2. Includes The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie. *The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 2, Blake Nevius, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1985) ISBN ISBN 978-0-94045021-9. Includes The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer.

*Sea Tales: The Pilot, The Red Rover, Kay Seymour House & Thomas Philbrick, eds. (New York: The Library of America, 1991) ISBN 0-940450-70-4

*The Cambridge History of American Literature, Fiction I: Brown, Cooper *Find-A-Grave profile for James Fenimore Cooper *"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

* * *