James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper (Burlington, New Jersey, 1789 - Cooperstown, New York, 1851) was an American novelist who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century. He matters because he shaped the American adventure novel, placing the frontier, the sea and the clash between settlers and Native Americans at its centre, at a time when the young republic was looking for a literature of its own distinct from European models.

He was born into a comfortable family. His father, William Cooper, founded the town of Cooperstown on land he owned, and much of James's childhood unfolded in that frontier setting. He entered Yale University at the age of thirteen, but his pranks on fellow students led to his expulsion in his third year, without a degree. He then worked as a merchant sailor and later joined the United States Navy as a midshipman. That experience gave him a practical knowledge of seamanship that shows up throughout his fiction.

He married Susan Augusta de Lancey in 1811, and the couple had seven children. His writing career began almost by accident. According to a well-known account, he set out in 1820 to write a better novel than the one his wife was reading aloud. That first attempt, Precaution, appeared anonymously and received a modest reception. His next book, The Spy (1821), was set during the Revolutionary War and became a bestseller at home and abroad, the first novel by an American author to achieve that reach.

His best-known work is the group of five frontier novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, written between 1823 and 1841. They follow the woodsman Natty Bumppo and his friendship with the Delaware chief Chingachgook. Cooper depicted the violence of the frontier in a prose often described as slow, and the contrast between the brutality of events and the measured rhythm of his sentences is one of his most noted features. He also wrote novels about naval life, which historians have judged more favourably than his contemporaries did, along with social, political and historical non-fiction aimed at building an original American culture free of European prejudice.

He spent most of his life in Cooperstown, where he died in 1851. His legacy lies in the frontier scout, who became a fixture of American literature, and in a model of adventure fiction that shaped later writers. The Last of the Mohicans remains his most widely read book.