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Authors
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
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James Franklin Beard was editor-in-chief of a long-planned and, after 1979, fast-appearing edition, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, published by the State University of New York. Excellent volumes of The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, and many other of Cooper’s works, have already appeared as part of an edition with forty-eight proposed volumes. Beard also edited the indispensable six-volume Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (1960– 68), but did not live to complete his longpromised biography. Wayne Franklin’s biography should become standard; see the first volume, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2007). For good biographical overviews, see James Grossman’s James Fenimore Cooper (1949) and Robert Emmet Long’s James Fenimore Cooper (1990). Essential background is in Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995), a biography of the author’s father as well as interpretation of The Pioneers. Critical reception is surveyed in George Dekker and John P. McWilliams’s Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage (1973), Robert Clark’s James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays (1985), and W. M. Verhoeven’s James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts (1993). Alan Frank Dyer compiled James Fenimore Cooper: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1991). Useful critical works include McWilliams’s Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (1972), H. Daniel Peck’s A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (1977), Wayne Franklin’s The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (1982), James D. Wallace’s Early Cooper and His Audience (1986), Donald A. Ringe’s James Fenimore Cooper (1988), Charles Hansford Adams’s “The Guardian of the Law”: Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper (1990), Geoffrey Rans’s Cooper’s Leatherstocking Series, A Secular Reading (1991), and Leland S. Person’s Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper (2006).
Cooper was raised near Otsego Lake in central New York, where his father owned a large property known as Cooperstown. At the age of twenty he inherited his father's fortune and married Susan De Lancy. Soon to become America's first successful novelist, Cooper wrote his first book in 1820 to prove to his wife that he could write a better novel than one they had been reading together. Though not an auspicious start, this novel, Precaution, was followed by The Spy (1821) and then by his breakthrough novel The Pioneers (1823), the first of five Natty Bumppo books known as the Leather-Stocking Tales. The popularity of the Leather-Stocking Tales -- all historical romances set in America -- gave Cooper the epithet "The American Scott," and Natty Bumppo, the aged hunter, would become an icon in American literature and culture. The other Leather-Stocking Tales are Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
When Cooper is referred to (or written off) as "the American Scott," the phrase usually refers to Cooper's romantic and epic adventure stories about Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and Chingachgook, his Mohegan friend and companion. These novels do have much in common with Walter Scott's tales of Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and other heroes of a bygone England and Scotland. But the stories of Natty did not begin as tales of derring-do. The Pioneers (1823), the first in the long series, grew out of Cooper's personal experience of growing up in the quick-changing frontier of upstate New York, where his father (like Judge Temple in the novel) was a patrician landowner and where strong traces of another age, of hunters, trappers, scouts, and Native Americans, were still to be seen among the expanding white settlements. Though Cooper can be grouped with the American Romantics, The Pioneers has much to recommend it as an early work of realism, a sharp-eyed and even prophetic account of the small, important details of an emerging culture, and of the cultures which were rapidly disappearing from that landscape.
1. It's not unusual for a Romantic novel to feature a hero with extraordinary or even supernatural skills with a weapon: prowess with a magic sword or a bow and arrow or a lance. In chapter III of The Pioneers we have an account of Natty as an eighty-year-old frontiersman, bringing down a pigeon with one shot of a musket, while the people of the town go to work with shotguns and even with a cannon. What special significance does Natty's shot take on in this chapter?
2. Cooper's prose is often described as ponderous. Read the first two paragraphs of chapter III of The Pioneers, and comment on the advantages and disadvantages of setting the scene and opening the action in this style. Look at the word choices and sentence lengths, and select specific phrases for consideration.
3. Read carefully the dialogue between Marmaduke and his daughter, Elizabeth, in chapter II of The Pioneers. How would you describe the sound and pace of this conversation? This kind of interaction was popular in Romantic novels and on the nineteenth-century stage. How does it differ from dialogue in modern or realistic fiction, and how can we account for the appeal of this older form?
