America's Storyteller
WALSH, PATRICK J.
America’s Storyteller Our vision of the early republic owes much to James Fenimore Cooper. BY PATRICK J. WALSH James Fenimore Cooper The Early Years by Wayne Franklin Yale, 752 pp., $40 James...
...In The Pioneers Natty (or Hawkeye) is an old man, yet by the time of the fi nal Leatherstocking tale, The Deerslayer (1841), Natty is a golden youth...
...Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts...
...Yet through Cooper’s art, the world got its fi rst pictures of the American wilderness, plains, frontiersmen, and Indians— all the romance and promise of America...
...Finding a more appealing subject in the union of history and adventure, Cooper tried again, and his second attempt met with better success...
...Perhaps this will be rectifi ed in the second volume...
...The result was Precaution (1820), an account of English high society that received little critical acclaim...
...He had hoped that democracy would make men self-suffi cient and independent enough to think for themselves...
...Four other books about this character, also known as Hawkeye, would complete Cooper’s famous Leatherstocking Tales, which form an epic of sorts about America...
...Among American writers in his time, Cooper expressed the greatest faith in American democracy, and would become the most disappointed...
...But upon returning to America in 1833, Cooper became embroiled in a lawsuit to recover property that had been taken by neighbors while he was abroad...
...Previously unavailable archival materials were made available to Franklin, and one fault here is that the author spends a little too much time on Cooper’s fi nances and legal transactions and not enough on his ideas and beliefs...
...The historian John Lukacs has called Cooper “our native Tocqueville...
...But his power of analysis went deeper, and with prescience, he identifi ed a problem that has only grown worse in America with time: One of the commonest arts practiced . . . is to simulate the existence of a general feeling in favor, or against, any particular man, or measure...
...His writing career began on a bet with his wife, Susan De Lancey, sister of the Episcopal bishop of New York...
...This was followed by The Pioneers (1823), where he introduced Natty Bumppo, one of the most famous creations in all fi ction, a fi gure who continues to haunt the American psyche and is a staple of Hollywood westerns...
...Curiously, the tales move backwards through time...
...He not only trailblazed the new literary landscape of the frontier and prairie but invented the sea novel with The Pilot (1823) and The Red Rover (1827...
...Lawrence speaks truly when he writes that this is the “true myth of America...
...Stories from the original settlers stimulated the boy’s imaginative capacity and love of history...
...so great being the deference paid to publick opinion, in a country like this, that men actually yield their own sentiment to that which they believe to be the sentiment of the majority...
...It is the myth of America...
...In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H...
...wrote D.H...
...Cooper was born in New Jersey and was moved in infancy to Cooperstown, New York, on Otsego Lake, where his father, a Federalist judge and congressman, owned great stretches of land...
...Melville remembered the “vivid and awakening power” Cooper had over him in his youth and, later in life, declared Cooper “a great, robust-souled man...
...The Spy (1821) was based on information supplied to Cooper by John Jay about an actual spy recruited by Jay during the Revolution...
...Writers as diverse as Balzac, Sir Walter Scott, and Leo Tolstoy had all praised Cooper...
...to the youngster the place was magical...
...Wayne Franklin’s is the fi rst assessment of Cooper in many years, and this opening volume (of two projected) contends with Cooper’s life until 1826, when he left the United States for a seven-year hiatus in Europe with his family...
...These “pictures...
...In the legal battle that Cooper ultimately won, the newspapers libeled him, and so he sued them as well...
...She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin...
...Both Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville praised Cooper’s talent for narrative and his skillful use of detail...
...His creative eye returned again and again to the region...
...Once highly regarded in Europe and America, his adventure novels are not appreciated in our day...
...His reputation received a drubbing from Mark Twain in his humorous essay—Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses (1895)—but after all, Twain found fault with other major American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and that apex of craft and style, Henry James...
...He predicted that “a grateful posterity will take the best care of Fenimore Cooper...
...One evening, reading aloud to her from one of the penny-dreadful romances popular at the time, Cooper grew weary of declaring that “I could write you a better book than this...
...Lawrence, were “some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature...
...Until recently the area had been a wilderness...
...Either way, Cooper deserves reevaluation...
...During this long period of litigation, he published The American Democrat, an important, though often overlooked, critique of democracy...
...And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin towards a new youth...
...BY PATRICK J. WALSH James Fenimore Cooper The Early Years by Wayne Franklin Yale, 752 pp., $40 James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), America’s fi rst successful novelist, dramatized the American experience to the world...
...As a republican gentleman, Cooper loathed uniformity and the tyranny of public opinion...
...The democratic experiment, he believed, depended on the responsibility of an independent citizenship to think and make judgments for the common good...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 13
