Happy 220th Birthday to James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper wrote the first great American novel, and then he wrote the second, third, and fourth as well.  Born in New Jersey as James Cooper on this date in 1789, he added Fenimore (his mother’s maiden name) as a middle name years later.  His family moved to Otsego County, New York when he was a child and James’ father founded the community now called Cooperstown, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales” are the fictional stories of Natty Bumpoo and the first excursions onto the American frontier.  The character of Bumppo and legends of such real heroes as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett provide the American literary landscape with the great archetypal outdoorsman and adventurer.  Cooper imbued Bumppo with traits like independence and courage, and gave him strong senses of adventure and justice. 

Those traits of the isolated frontiersman—friend of the native American, something of a pariah in his own world—are handed down to our later heroes in the genre of cowboy/western age. James Fenimore Cooper successfully predicted the rush westward and the thin tolerance the adventurer would have for the increase of civilization as well as the thin tolerance civilization would have for the adventurer.  Once the lands between the oceans were conquered, Cooper foresaw, this character’s way of life would be obsolete.

Cooper was also sympathetic to the plight of the native American, stating in his introduction to The Last of the Mohicans (1831), “The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent.  They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost, is represented as having already befallen them.  There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.”

James Fenimore Cooper died the day before his sixty-second birthday in 1851; he is buried in Christ Churchyard, Cooperstown, New York. This circa 1827 portrait of Cooper, by Amélie Kautz De Lacepede, is part of the collections at the National Portrait Gallery.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery