James Fenimore Cooper

Abstract

The preeminent American novelist of the first half of the 19th century, James Fenimore Cooper (b. 1789–d. 1851) was a prolific writer best known for his five-novel saga The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper’s productivity from 1820 to 1851 is virtually unrivaled, publishing thirty-two novels, several books of nonfiction, a few histories, and sundry other works. Cooper’s popularity in the United States and Europe skyrocketed in the 1820s with his first ventures in spy, sea, American Revolution, and frontier fictions, not the least of which was the trilogy that began the Leatherstocking series. Cooper’s sales in the United States dipped quite dramatically in the early 1830s when he published political nonfiction and three European novels, all with strong political overtones. Reviving the Leather-Stocking Tales in 1840 with The Pathfinder and, in 1841, with The Deerslayer vaulted him into popularity once again. His productivity crested in his last full decade, when he published fifteen novels, thereby cementing his reputable place in literary history. From 1960 to the present, critical interest in Cooper has been steadily fruitful, particularly in biography, sociohistorical criticism, and cultural studies. Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales remain his most visited writings among scholars and teachers, with more attention shifting recently to his many other novels. Since 1960, four major Cooper projects have undergirded a sustained interest in Cooper’s writings. The first has been the compilation of Cooper’s Letters and Journals edited by James Franklin Beard in 1960–1968 (see Cooper 1960–1968 [cited under Letters]). The collection’s easy accessibility to Cooper’s lively epistles and journals renewed interest in the writer, and the compilation has since become a staple of Cooper studies. Second is another project spearheaded by Beard, who founded “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper,” or the Cooper Edition (see Beard and Schachterle 1980– [cited under Editions and In the Classroom]). With the publication of its first scholarly edition approved by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association in 1980, the Cooper Edition launched its ongoing effort to establish clear texts of Cooper’s writings and publish them for scholarly and pedagogical purposes. Third is the James Fenimore Cooper Society (cited under Bibliographies), founded by Hugh C. MacDougall in 1989, which quickly grew into an international community of Cooper scholars and enthusiasts. The society has published many papers about Cooper’s writings in newsletters, conference proceedings, and its principal publication, the James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal (cited under Journals). Fourth is the two-volume Cooper biography by Wayne Franklin, published in 2007 and 2017 (Franklin 2007b and Franklin 2017 [both cited under Biographies]). Franklin’s authoritative biography is informed, in part, by Cooper’s personal papers, which the novelist had requested his family to keep private. Access to the papers gave the biographer a rich store of new information for his portrait of Cooper and the astute readings of the author’s works that season the biography. The new life of Cooper has become an invaluable resource for Cooper studies.