James Fenimore Cooper Research Paper

James Fenimore Cooper’s Biography James Fenimore Cooper is considered to be one of the first truly influential American writers, standing out from the heavily British-based literature of the time. Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey on September 15, 1789. His upbringing was thoroughly American, considering his mother, “Elizabeth Fenimore, was a member of a respectable New Jersey Quaker family, and his father, William, founded a frontier settlement at the source of the Susquehanna River (now Cooperstown, New York) and served as a Federalist congressman during the administrations of George Washington and John Adams” (Augustyn 98). Cooper was raised with opportunities to pursue a good education and he did not face the struggles of frontier life because he was the 11th out of twelve children (Augustyn 98). His family was situated in Albany, New York by the time he

The books were published out of the natural order of Bumppo’s life; the first novel, The Pioneers (1823), is about the elderly version of him and the last novel, The Deerslayer (1841), is about him in his youth. But perhaps the most popular novel of the Leatherstocking Tales is the second one, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which follows Bumppo in his prime as a warrior amongst soldiers during the French and Indian War. The Leatherstocking Tales primarily dealt with Native American life, while three more of his earlier novels (The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Water Witch) were about the sea, and another three (The Spy, Lionel Lincoln, and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish) were about American History (Encyclopedia of World Biography). Cooper and his family traveled all over Europe and he mainly wrote romances, but by the time the Coopers were re-settled in the states by 1840, most of his works were critiques on the social and political scale (Encyclopedia of World