James Fenimore Cooper :: essays research papers

pile Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey on September 15, 1789. He was the eleventh of twelve children born to William and Elizabeth Cooper. When James was one year old the family moved to the frontier, and his father established the settlement of Cooperstown at the head of Susquehanna River.&9Cooper attended a cloak-and-dagger preparatory school at Albany, New York, and was then admitted to Yale in 1803. He was expelled from there during his junior year because of a silly prank. His family allowed him to join the navy as a midshipman, but he soon found that more discipline was present in the Navy than at Yale. In 1810 Cooper took a furlough, and neer returned to active duty.&9After Coopers father passed in 1809, he received a nice inheritance. Cooper quickly squandered his inheritance, and at cardinal was on the verge of bankruptcy. He decided to try his hand at writing as a career. Carefully modeling his work after Sir Walter Scotts lucky Waverly Novels, he wrote his first novel in 1820 called Precaution. A domestic comedy set in England, lost money, but Cooper had discovered his vocation.&9Cooper established his reputation after his second novel, The Spy, and in his third book, the autobiographical Pioneers (1823), Cooper introduced the character of Natty Bumppo, a uniquely American embodiment of rugged indivi three-foldism and the pioneer spirit. A second book featuring Bumppo, The Last of the Mohicans written in 1826, quickly became the most widely read work of the day, solidify Coopers popularity in the U.S. and in Europe. Set during the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans chronicles the massacre of the colonial garrison at Fort William Henry and a fictional nobble of two pioneer sisters. Cooper knew few Indians, so he drew on a Moravian missionarys account of two opposing tribes the Delawares and the "Mingos." Although this characterization was filled with inaccuracies, the dual image of the opposing t ribes allowed Cooper to create a lasting image of the Indian that became a part of the American consciousness for almost two centuries. His commonplace was simultaneously touched romantically at the doomed Indians fate and justified in abetting their extermination. The hero of the novel, Natty Bumppo, was incredibly popular, a rebel heroically contradictory to industrial society, he was a hero who never married or changed his ideals.&9Cooper was a prolific writer, publishing 32 novels, 12 works of nonfiction, a play and numerous pamphlets and articles.