James Fenimore Cooper papers

James Fenimore Cooper was born on September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, as the eleventh of twelve children of William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper. Shortly after his first birthday, the family relocated to Cooperstown, New York, a settlement his father had founded on a large tract of land at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River. William Cooper was a prominent landowner, judge, and Federalist congressman, and James grew up in privileged circumstances on the New York frontier. He attended Yale College beginning at age thirteen but was expelled in 1805. He subsequently sailed on a merchant vessel before receiving a commission as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy in 1808. He resigned his commission in 1811 upon marrying Susan De Lancey, daughter of a wealthy Westchester County family, and settled into the life of a country gentleman. Cooper did not begin writing until 1820, and it was his second novel, The Spy (1821), a tale of espionage during the American Revolution, that established his reputation. He went on to produce the five novels of the Leatherstocking Tales: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), all featuring the frontier scout Natty Bumppo, which became his most enduring literary legacy.

In 1826, Cooper moved his family to Europe, where they remained until 1833, residing primarily in France and also traveling in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. He served informally as U.S. consul at Lyon and developed a close friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette. His years abroad deepened his republican convictions and drew him into European political affairs. He published The Bravo in 1831, a novel set in Venice that attacked oligarchical government, and became increasingly engaged as a political writer. In late 1831, Cooper entered the Finance Controversy, a public debate sparked in the French Chamber of Deputies when Lafayette cited the United States government as a model of fiscal economy. Sébastien Louis Saulnier, a journalist at the Revue Britannique, challenged Lafayette's figures, arguing that a limited monarchy was more cost-efficient than a republic. Cooper responded with a Letter to General Lafayette on the Expenditure of the United States of America, published in Paris in December 1831, defending the American republican model. He then contributed a series of letters to the Parisian daily Le National between February 24 and March 7, 1832, continuing the argument. He intended to compile these writings into a pamphlet for American audiences. After returning to the United States in 1833, Cooper published A Letter to My Countrymen (1834), in which he gave his own account of the controversy and criticized American press coverage of it. He spent much of the remainder of his life in Cooperstown and continued writing novels, works of social criticism, and a History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839). He died in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851, one day before his sixty-second birthday.

References

Dekker, George, and John P. McWilliams, eds. Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

Grossman, James. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949.

Spiller, Robert E. Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times. New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931.

Cooper, James Fenimore. Letter of J. Fenimore Cooper, to Gen. Lafayette, on the Expenditure of the United States of America. Paris: Baudry's Foreign Library, 1831. Facsimile reprint, with a bibliographical note by Robert E. Spiller. New York: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society, 1931.

"James Fenimore Cooper." Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed April 20, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Fenimore-Cooper.