James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper has long been undervalued as an artist, and with Charles A. Brady that his case should be reopened and judged once again. Thus, although it recognizes his well-known faults and failures, it chooses not to emphasize them, but to stress instead the thematic interpretation of his tales and the means, sometimes highly successful, by which he gave his themes expression. It asks the reader, therefore, to lay aside his preconceptions, to see the novels in their own terms, and to seek the meaning that they, like all works of literary art, will yield if carefully read for themselves alone. The purpose is to understand the tales that they may be evaluated in the light of that knowledge.

When James Fenimore Cooper published Precaution at the age of thirty-one, he was a gentleman farmer turned novelist by accident. Half of his life was already behind him, a life that had shown little promise of what was to come. Reared at Cooperstown , New York , a village well past the frontier stage, he had grown up the son of a wealthy land speculator, attended Yale until he was dismissed for a prank in his junior year, made a voyage to Europe in a merchant vessel, and served for several years in the Navy. After his marriage to Susan Augusta DeLancey, he settled down to a comfortable life which was typified by his membership in the local agricultural and Bible societies, his commission as colonel in the militia, and his investment in a whaling vessel. It was truly a fortunate accident that turned Cooper into a writer, for the obscure New York gentleman embarked on a course that was to place him first in the line of major American novelists.

To be sure, Cooper is not usually accorded so high a position in American fiction; for, although he has always had his defenders, his reputation by and large has steadily declined for over a century. Cooper has been, in Marius Bewley's words, so "consistently underestimated as an artist" that today his work is widely regarded as hardly fare for mature readers. His tales of the forest and sea have been relegated to the rank of children's books and the rest of his novels are left unread on the shelves of libraries. Many literate Americans know him only through Mark Twain's delightfully funny but grossly unfair criticism; and, assuming that Twain is giving a just account of The Deerslayer, they fail to read even the best of Cooper's novels. Indeed, so low has Cooper's reputation fallen that at least one reviewer of an excellent study by Charles A. Brady has expressed some surprise at the treatment that Brady accords him.

But Cooper has not been entirely neglected. Several excellent biographies have already been written, and the standard histories of American literature generally give him his due. His historical importance is unquestioned. As Howard Mumford Jones has shown, the number of "firsts" to be attributed to Cooper is truly astonishing. Among his first four books are two truly revolutionary ones, The Pioneers and The Pilot; and in The Last of the Mohicans he composed what is perhaps the classic tale of frontier adventure. Too much stress on this aspect of Cooper's work, however, has had an unfortinate consequence: it has drawn perhaps too much attention to Cooper's early tales to the detriment of his later, more sophisticated ones. More people know The Spy than The Bravo or Wyandotte, The Last of the Mohicans than The Deerslayer, The Pilot than The Two Admirals or Afloat and Ashore. Ironically, Cooper is best known for what is essentially his apprentice work.