James fenimore cooper biography timeline info

James Fenimore Cooper
Author
Born: September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey
Died: September 14, 1851, Cooperstown, New York
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Arts & Letters

Thanks to a keen understanding of his audience, James Fenimore Cooper became the best-known American novelist of the first half of the 19th century. His fame spread around the world, and his novels helped formulate the mythology of the American frontier.

Cooper was born in New Jersey, but raised in Cooperstown, a settlement founded by his father in upstate New York. By age 13, Cooper was enrolled at Yale University, but he was expelled following a youthful prank. Instead, he joined the crew of a merchant vessel and on several voyages got his first glimpses of England and the Mediterranean. By age 19 he joined the U.S. Navy and quickly rose to the rank of midshipman.

After resigning from the Navy, Cooper decided to try his hand at writing. His interest in the infant American nation’s history and his diverse experiences at sea and in the still unsettled areas of upstate New York provided plenty of inspiration for his life’s work. His second novel, “The Spy,” published in 1821, brought Cooper instant recognition. A tale of espionage during the American Revolution, “The Spy” became a bestseller at home and abroad, a first for an American writer.

Cooper’s next novel, “The Pioneers” (1823), was the first of five books about frontier life that became known as the Leatherstocking Tales. “The Pioneers” introduced readers to Natty Bumpoo, a colorful and fearless character who befriends a Delaware Indian chief named Chingachgook.

Natty Bumpoo (as Hawk-eye) and Chingachgook would reappear three years later as central characters in Cooper’s most famous work, “The Last of the Mohicans,” an action-packed novel set during the French and Indian War. Brimming with romance, betrayal, revenge and heroism, “The Last of the Mohicans” has maintained its appeal for more than two centuries and

Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was the first major American writer todeal imaginatively with American life, notably in his five "Leather-Stocking Tales." He was also a critic of the political, social, and religious problems of the day.

James Cooper (his mother's family name of Fenimore was legally added in 1826) was born in Burlington, N.J., on Sept. 15, 1789, the eleventh of 12 children of William Cooper, a pioneering landowner and developer in New Jersey and New York. When James was 14 months old, his father moved the family to a vast tract of wilderness at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River in New York State where, on a system of small land grants, he had established the village of Cooperstown at the foot of Otsego Lake.

Here, in the "Manor House," later known as Otsego Hall, Cooper grew up, the privileged son of the "squire" of a primitive community. He enjoyed the amenities of a transplanted civilization while reading, in the writings of the wilderness missionary John Gottlieb Heckewelder, about the Native Americans who had long since retreated westward, and about life in the Old World in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Meanwhile, he attended the local school and Episcopal church. The lore of the wilderness learned from excursions into the surrounding forests and from local trappers and hunters, the stories of life in the great estates of neighboring Dutch patroons and English patentees, and the gossip of revolution-torn Europe brought by refugees of all classes furnished him with materials for his later novels, histories, and commentaries.

For the present, however, Cooper was a vigorous and obstreperous young man who was sent away to be educated, first by a clergyman in Albany, and then at Yale, from which he was dismissed for a student prank. His father next arranged for him to go to sea, first in a merchant vessel to England and Spain, and then in the Navy; these experien

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James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) invented the key forms of American fiction―the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain―who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his “literary offenses.” His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Cooper’s fictions traced native losses to their economic sources.
Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Cooper’s life to be based on full access to his family papers. Cooper’s life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavors, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years covers Cooper’s life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.

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