James Fenimore Cooper

(1789–1851)

Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste.

(The Last of the Mohicans)

James Fenimore Cooper was born into two wealthy families: His mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, was an heiress, and his father, William Cooper, succeeded in land speculation after the Revolutionary War. Some of the land, the 40, 000 acres known as the Croghan Patent, would become central to Cooper’s identity and his writing. The family mansion, named Otsego Hall for the lake adjoining the land grant, would become the model for Judge Marmaduke Temple’s estate in The Pioneers. From all accounts of his family members and his instructors, Cooper was “extravagantly fond of reading novels and amusing tales”. His precociousness—he matriculated at the age of 13 at Yale—was tempered by his desire to be outdoors, engaged in physical sport, or else playing a practical joke on fellow students or professors. Because of his propensity for pranks and literature above all other subjects, Cooper was expelled from Yale in his junior year. His subsequent year at sea as “a common sailor-before-the-mast” was, in the opinion of his biographer Robert Emmet Long, “one of the most formative experiences of his life”. After his marriage, James acceded to his wife’s request that he forgo a life at sea. His fondness for sea life appeared, however, in some of his fiction and is seen by critics as a precursor to Herman Melville’s nautical novels such as Moby-Dick. It is certainly true that the wilderness of his childhood surroundings significantly shaped Cooper’s imagination and would appear time and again as the backdrop for his fiction.

In December 1809, Cooper’s father “was struck from behind by a political opponent and died as a result of the blow”. Copper received a significant inheritance from his father: $50, 000 and an interest in the father’s estate estimated at $750, 000 (16). Cooper was only 19 years old. Soon after his father’s death, James married Susan Delancey, the granddaughter of the former governor of New York (16). In marrying into such a wealthy and powerful family, Cooper was following in his father’s footsteps. For a time, the couple lived at Angevine Farm, where Cooper fulfilled the role of a “gentleman farmer”. The two had five daughters, but only four survived to adulthood. Their first daughter, Elizabeth, died two years after her birth.

The events that led up to his literary career range from the tragic to the comic. Despite Cooper’s significant inheritance, the economic depression after the War of 1812 and the careless speculations of his four elder brothers depleted the family estate to the extent that the family home, Otsego Hall, was sold. Thus, Cooper was economically motivated to fulfill the boast his daughter Sarah recorded after her father read a contemporary English novel. As Sarah recounts in her “Small Family Memories, ” Cooper, disgusted by the lack of quality in the English novel, declared that he could write a better novel himself. His first novel, Precaution, appeared in November 1820 and was followed shortly by the next, The Spy (18). The family moved from their farm in Scarsdale to New York City in order for Cooper to be closer to editors and others in the publishing world, and to ensure that his daughters receive a proper education. This second work garnered Cooper international attention as The Spy was translated into numerous languages, and thus was available to a multilingual readership.

Because of the success of The Spy, readers eagerly awaited the arrival of his third novel, The Pioneers, which appeared in print in 1823. The Pioneers was the first in the Leatherstocking Tales series, which included The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Deerslayer, and The Pathfi nder. Cooper’s early fame was solidified by the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, and because of its popularity, he took his family on a grand tour of the Continent, which kept him away from North America for seven years. Critic Robert Emmet Long suggests that one of the reasons for the family’s long stint in Europe was economic: Cooper wanted “to make the foreign publication of his works yield more significant income. In the absence of international copyright laws, his novels had been pirated freely; but Cooper now planned and while in Europe secured arrangements to have the books published in authorized editions”. While in Paris, Cooper met and befriended Sir Walter Scott and Samuel F. B. Morse (who invented the telegraph). He wrote and published The Prairie, The Red Rover, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman during his seven-year stay abroad.

Upon his return to the United States in 1833, Cooper fell into a deep despair over the vast changes that he witnessed in the land of his birth. The country’s rapid growth and its obsession with material wealth were disheartening to Cooper. His response took the form of a pamphlet entitled “A Letter to His Countrymen, ” in which he critiqued the nation’s isolationism, defended the policies of President Andrew Jackson, and announced his retirement as a novelist. It is fortunate that his retirement was short lived, as he needed a vehicle for his nervous energies and returned to the page, publishing a satire of America, The Monikins, in 1835. The following year, he repurchased his family home of Otsego Hall and became embroiled in a controversy over the public use of his lands, Three Mile Point. The public outcry was substantial, and Whig editors who were already unhappy with Cooper because of ideas expressed in his pamphlet attacked him and his novels in their newspapers. The public controversy seems to have spurred Cooper to a heightened degree of literary productivity as he published an astonishing 20 works in the 1840s, two of them the “dark” contributions to the Leatherstocking series.

Cooper’s chronic liver illness was responsible for his rapid decline, beginning when he turned 60. “He wrote until he could no longer hold a pen, and then dictated chapters [for a history book called The Towns of Manhattan ] to his daughter Susan”. He died at his family home on September 14, 1851, just hours shy of his 62d birthday. His wife died a few months later, and their daughter Susan, who never married, was buried with Cooper’s journal when she died in the 1880s.