James Fenimore Cooper :: essays research papers

James Fenimore cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey on September 15, 1789. He was the eleventh of twelve children born to William and Elizabeth make. When James was one year gray-haired the family moved to the frontier, and his father established the settlement of Cooperstown at the head of Susquehanna River.& antiophthalmic factor9Cooper attended a private preparatory civilise at Albany, New York, and was then admitted to Yale in 1803. He was expelled from there during his lowly year because of a silly prank. His family allowed him to join the navy as a midshipman, but he soon found that more discipline was invest in the Navy than at Yale. In 1810 Cooper took a furlough, and neer returned to active duty.&9After Coopers father passed in 1809, he received a nice inheritance. Cooper readily squandered his inheritance, and at thirty was on the verge of bankruptcy. He decided to try his authorise at writing as a career. Carefully modeling his work on aft(prenominal) S ir Walter Scotts successful Waverly Novels, he wrote his first novel in 1820 called Precaution. A domestic comedy set in England, lost money, but Cooper had discovered his vocation.&9Cooper established his reputation after his second novel, The Spy, and in his third book, the autobiographical Pioneers (1823), Cooper introduced the character of debonaire Bumppo, a uniquely American personification of rugged indivi dualism and the groundbreaker spirit. A second book featuring Bumppo, The Last of the Mohicans written in 1826, quickly became the most widely read work of the day, solidifying Coopers popularity in the U.S. and in Europe. Set during the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans chronicles the massacre of the colonial place at Fort William Henry and a fictional kidnapping of twain pioneer sisters. Cooper knew few Indians, so he drew on a Moravian missionarys account of ii opposing tribes the Delawares and the "Mingos." Although this characterization was filled with inaccuracies, the dual doubling of the opposing tribes allowed Cooper to create a lasting image of the Indian that became a part of the American consciousness for almost two centuries. His public was simultaneously touched romantically at the doomed Indians batch and justified in abetting their extermination. The hero of the novel, Natty Bumppo, was incredibly popular, a renegade heroically opposed to industrial society, he was a hero who neer married or changed his ideals.&9Cooper was a fat writer, publishing 32 novels, 12 works of nonfiction, a play and many pamphlets and articles.