The New International Encyclopædia/Cooper, James Fenimore
COOPER,  (1789-1851). An
American novelist, born at Burlington, N. J.,
September 15, 1789. His father came of good
English and Quaker stock; his mother, Elizabeth
Fenimore, was a Swede and also of Quaker
ancestry. He was the eleventh of twelve children,
and in his second year was taken by his father,
William, to a large estate that he had acquired
near Otsego Lake shortly after the Revolution.
Here had been already laid out the site of
Cooperstown. For some years the family lived in a
log house, but the settlement prospered, and,
determining to make it his home permanently,
Cooper's father, who for many years represented
the district in Congress, began in the year 1796
to build a manor house, Otsego Hall, which was
for many years the finest residence in that region.
That Cooper thus spent his boyhood years on the
frontier of civilization, surrounded by primeval
forests, and never far removed from the
possibility of Indian raids, while in daily contact with
the red men who came to Cooperstown for trade,
was most important to his future literary
development. The environment stimulated his
imagination, made him responsive to the sense
of mystery, and gave him materials for the most
important section of his writings, the
Leather-stocking Tales. He passed through the village
school and received private instruction in the
family of the Rev. Mr. Ellison, rector of Saint
Peter's, Albany, whose refined culture and
un-American ideals had a not altogether desirable
effect on the style and character of the future
novelist, who was something of an aristocrat at
heart. In January, 1803, Cooper went to Yale
College. Here he learned more out of doors than
in the classroom. Indeed, he neglected his studies
with such persistent defiance of academic
restraints that he was expelled in his third year.

His father resented the action of the faculty, but
readers may be glad that the future novelist of
the sea should have been led to choose a naval
career. To fit himself for this, there being no
Naval Academy at that time, Cooper entered the
merchant service as a sailor before the mast
(September, 1806), and after sixteen months'
experience on the sea, in London, and at Gibraltar,
received a midshipman's commission (January 1,
1808). He served for a time on the Vesuvius,
then with a construction party on Lake Ontario,
where he saw a new aspect of frontier life and
became familiar with the details of ship-building.
He saw also other forms of naval service before
his resignation in 1811. Meantime he had been
married (January 1, 1811) to a daughter of
John Peter DeLancey, who came of a conspicuous
Tory family. The marriage was happy, but Cooper's
resignation on the eve of the War of 1812 did
not escape criticism, for a Tory connection seemed
to imply lack of patriotism. For the next ten
years he lived chiefly in Westchester County, his
wife's home, devoting himself to farming and
becoming the father of six children before
he conceived the idea of authorship. As it was,
he began to write, less in emulation of the success
of others than through conviction of their failure.
He had been reading an English novel aloud,
when he suddenly said to his wife, “I believe I
could write a better story myself,” and proceeded
to try it. But Precaution (1820), dealing with
high life in England, about which Cooper knew
nothing, was naturally a failure, and wholly
uncharacteristic of his future work. Then when
advised to deal with more local themes, he remembered
a story that John Jay had told years before
about a spy, and his home in Westchester, the
scene of much fighting during the Revolution,
furnished a fit stage for the play of his fancy.
The result was The Spy (1821-22), which
achieved a success till then unapproached in
America, and determined its author to pursue
his new-found career. It proved to a very
self-conscious generation that it was not impossible
for America to produce a novelist almost worthy
of being ranked with the great author of Waverly.
Even to-day it remains a stirring narrative
that deals adequately with important events, and
in Harvey Birch, the Spy, it has added to our
national fiction one of its few imperishable
characters.

In 1823 Cooper began what is now known as
the Leather-stocking Series with The Pioneers,
for he did not compose the famous five romances
in their natural chronological order. Early in
the next year he published The Pilot, thus
practically for the first time joining the ocean to the
domain of fiction, just as he had previously added
the backwoods, and as he was soon to add the
prairie. He also added to Harvey Birch and
Natty Bumppo his third great character, Long
Tom Coffin. He now removed to New York City,
and shortly after had a serious illness. His next
novel was Lionel Lincoln (1825), a story of
Boston during the Revolution. This was not
specially successful, but in 1826 The Last of the
Mohicans placed him at the summit of his
popularity and probably represented his highest
achievement.

In 1826 he changed his name, in compliance
with the wishes of his grandmother, from
simple James Cooper to James Fenimore-Cooper,
but soon dropped the hyphen. He

could not so easily get rid of the misapprehensions
caused by his act in a crude society.
Immediately afterwards he went abroad and
resided there for seven years, during which time he
was the recipient in foreign capitals of many
attentions from distinguished people, but felt called
upon, as in The Bravo (1831), to proclaim vigorously
the beneficent greatness of republican
institutions. His pride in the better features of
American government and society did not,
however, prevent him from being one of the first
Americans to perceive how really crude his
fellow-citizens were, and he told them their faults
with a frankness that was not discreet. He
exploited his prejudices against New England
and in favor of the Episcopal Church, and soon
became in his native land a synonym of all that
was unpopular and snobbish. His honest, if
over-emphatic, strictures outweighed with his
comically sensitive critics such fine romances as
The Prairie (1827), The Red Rover ( 1828 — the
dates of Cooper's books are often hard to determine
exactly), and the less interesting, but creditable,
Water Witch (1830). But the fault was
not entirely on the side of his countrymen, for
he took an injudicious part in more or less
unnecessary foreign discussions of American
political affairs.

On his return to America, in 1833, he at first
spent his winters in New York City, but soon
took up his permanent abode at Cooperstown.
Here he published several volumes of travels, and
still not restraining himself from criticism of his
countrymen, especially in his story, Home as
Found (1838), he was again embroiled in bitter
controversy and exposed to almost incomprehensible
vituperation, which was increased through
the fact that in 1837 a dispute had arisen with
regard to the claims of his townspeople upon a
certain tract of the Cooper estate. The great
author's determination to enforce his plain rights
was distorted by the newspapers into a heinous
crime. And, ironically enough, just at that time
this proud aristocrat was being denounced in
England for his obtrusive republicanism. But
Cooper still plied his pen and produced his
History of the Navy of the United States (1839),
his Pathfinder (1840), his Deerslayer (1841),
The Two Admirals (1842), and Wing-and-Wing
(1842). For the admirable English and
Mediterranean setting of the last two stories he was
as much indebted to his European stay as he was
to his return to the home of his boyhood for his
equally admirable setting of the two novels
preceding. Mention should be made here of an
‘anti-rent series’ of novels, dealing with the
well-known demagogic agitation against the proprietors
of certain large estates in New York. These
were Satanstoe, The Chain-Bearer, and The
Red-skins (1845-46). The first of them contains one
of the best pictures that we have of life in
colonial New York.

Yet, while Cooper was thus composing novels
which have been translated into many languages,
and have gained him an undying reputation
abroad, especially in France, he was bringing
libel suits against many of the Whig editors of
his native State, among them Horace Greeley,
Thurlow Weed, and James Watson Webb. He was
Quixotic enough to conduct these suits himself,
and he proved able to win verdicts which finally
brought his critics to their senses, although they
did little to restore his popularity. A later
generation
smiles wonderingly at the whole matter,
but sympathizes with the pugnacious author.
The last few years of Cooper's life saw the
publication of enough novels to occupy an ordinary
lifetime, but they added little to his reputation.
He maintained his proud independence to the last,
and just before his death forbade his family to
give any biographer access to his papers, an
injunction which has been obeyed, but which has not
prevented the life written by Prof. T. R. Lounsbury
(q.v.) in the “American Men of Letters
Series” (Boston, 1885) from being an admirable
piece of work. Cooper died at Cooperstown, N. Y.,
September 14, 1851. Six months after his death
a public meeting in New York, addressed by Daniel
Webster and William Cullen Bryant did
something to atone for the evil treatment America had
accorded one of the very greatest of her writers.

But even after the lapse of half a century, it
can hardly be said that Americans are prepared
to do full justice to Cooper. His great romances
are frequently spoken of as if they were, in the
main, fit reading for boys only. His undoubted
defects, such as his careless style, his exploitation
of his prejudices, his stilted conversations,
his inability, as a rule, to draw women who were
not distressingly prim, the fact that he wrote
entirely too many novels, and that not a few of
his men are as wooden as his women — these grave
faults have been put forward, while his greater
merits have been kept in the background. For,
when at his best, as in nearly all the romances
named above, Cooper was a very great novelist.
He had the narrative faculty of carrying his readers
along, however much they might grumble at
this detail or that. In “Leatherstocking” he
added a character to the small gallery of the
world's fictitious personages — something no other
American has ever done, except Mrs. Stowe — and
in Harvey Birch, Long Tom Coffin, and other
sailors, as well as in Uncas, Chingachgook, and
other Indians, he created characters of undying
power. His Indians, at whom it was once the fashion
to sneer, as the creations of a romantic
fancy, are now said by ethnologists to be far from
overdrawn portraitures. He was, as we have seen,
practically the first writer to extend the domain
of fiction over the sea, the primeval forest, and
the prairie. If he was in a way a follower of a
still greater romancer, Scott, he won the enthusiastic
commendation of another great writer of
fiction, Balzac, and he has the unique credit of
having written a prose epic of the planting of his
native country, which is as spacious and free
as the virgin woods and lakes amid which its
scenes are laid. In other words, Cooper is a
large genius, who ranks well with his
fellow-romancers. It is almost absurd to judge one
of Cooper's rapidly written romances by the
canons one might legitimately apply to a short
story by Daudet or Maupassant. When the man
is judged in the large by the effects of his best
works, and when he is compared with his rivals
like Simms and Bird, and with his predecessor,
Brockden Brown, his full genius and the service
he did American literature emerge splendidly.
For carrying power his work has probably had
no equal in America; with fewer crying faults
he would in all likelihood have been our greatest
author.

A full bibliography of Cooper is not needed
here, but to the works already named may be
added: The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829); The

Heidenmauer (1832); The Headsman (1833);
Sketches of Switzerland (1835); The American
Democrat (1838); The Chronicles of Cooperstown
(1838); Homeward Bound (1838);
Mercedes of Castile (1840); Wyandotte (1843);
Ned Myers (1843); Afloat and Ashore (1844);
The Crater (1847); Jack Tier (1848); Oak
Openings (1848); The Sea-Lions (1849); and
The Ways of the Hour (1850); Lounsbury's
Life, already mentioned, contains a good bibliography
and the best criticism that has yet been
devoted to Cooper. Consult, also: Clymer, James
Fenimore Cooper (1901); Richardson, American
Literature, vol. ii. (New York, 1887-88);
Wendell, A Literary History of America (New York,
1900); and essays by Mark Twain, T. W.
Higginson, and Brander Matthews.