James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years

"James Cooper" he was born and named in 1789. "James FENIMORE Cooper" he was renamed by the New York Legislature in 1836. He died in 1855. In JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS, University of Connecticut Professor of English Wayne Franklin takes his subject from birth to departure with family for seven years in Europe in 1826. Still only 36 years old when he sailed from Manhattan June 1, 1836, the young author had just published THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS The Last of the Mohicans (Tantor Unabridged Classics), his sixth novel. Its five predecessors, beginning in 1820 were PRECAUTION Precaution, THE SPY The Spy, THE PIONEERS The Pioneers (Signet Classics), THE PILOT The pilot: a tale of the sea. By James Fenimore Cooper. Illustrated from drawings by F. O. C. Darley. AND LIONEL LINCOLN Lionel Lincoln (The Works of James Fenimore Cooper: Mohawk Edition). He had also issued TALES FOR FIFTEEN Imagination and Heart, Tales for Fifteen, a book of short stories, under the pseudonym Jane Morgan. Cooper had first visited Europe 20 years earlier as a young merchant seaman. He had then been a US naval officer just before the War of 1812. He had recently turned down Secretary of State Henry Clay's offer of appointment as Minister to Sweden/Norway (Cooper sensed too much unavoidable work, distracting from his writing!) while accepting from President John Quincy Adams a sinecure: undemanding, revenue-producing commission as American consul at the newly created post in Lyons, France. If you read nothing more of this impressive scholarly tome, at least dig into its packed 23 page "Introduction." From its first paragraph you are reminded that "James Fenimore Cooper (1789 -1851) remains one of the most original yet most misunderstood figures in the history of American culture. Almost single-handedly in the 1820s Cooper invented the key forms of American fiction -- the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary romance. ... Furthermore, in producing and shrewdly marketing fully 10 percent of all American novels in the 1820s, most of them best sellers, Cooper made it possible for other aspiring authors to earn a living by their writings" (xi). Cooper was also (Introduction, xxxi) a "representative" man, a creature of his age of marked economic anxiety. Indeed, the economy, especially Cooper's debts inherited from his father, Judge William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, drives the biography. Until recently, the Cooper estate held back from scholars many of Cooper's papers. Wayne Franklin happily draws upon them to demonstrate the Angst that drove Cooper year after year to look for paths to financial stability: real estate, whaling off the coast of Brazil and finally writing. Cooper seemed, barely, to hold poverty at bay, but at his death, his survivors had to scramble to make ends meet. An earlier biographer had portrayed James Fenimore Cooper as a wealthy gentleman of leisure who dabbled in literature as a pastime. Not so. Towards the end of his narrative of