Biographical fact sheet on james fenimore cooper
Biographical fact sheet on james fenimore cooperBiographical Fact Sheet on James Fenimore Cooper
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 Cooper. When James was one year old the family moved to the frontier, and his father established the settlement of Cooperstown at the head of Susquehanna River.
Cooper attended a private preparatory school at Albany, New York, and was then admitted to Yale in 1803. He was expelled from there during his junior 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 present in the Navy than at Yale. In 1810 Cooper took a furlough, and never returned to active duty.
After Cooper's father passed in 1809, he received a nice inheritance. Cooper quickly squandered his inheritance, and at thirty was on the verge of bankruptcy. He decided to try his hand at writing as a career. Carefully modeling his work after Sir Walter Scott's 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.
Cooper established his reputation after his second novel, The Spy, and in his third book, the autobiographical Pioneers (1823), Cooper introduced the character of Natty Bumppo, a uniquely American personification of rugged individualism and the pioneer 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 Cooper's popularity in the U.S. and in...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.