Fenimore Cooper's America
Alan Taylor examines how the social concerns and ambitions of the new republic and those of the author of Last of the Mohicans intertwined - and how they gave him the canvas to become the United States' first great novelist.
Twentieth-century readers know the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper as the author of the five 'Leatherstocking Tales', including The Last of the Mohicans, set in the North American forest and prairie during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These novels of frontier violence and adventure helped define the American experience and identity, especially for European readers. Although his narrative voice conveys a powerful self-assurance, James Fenimore Cooper, in fact, became a novelist during the early 1820s at the same time that his inherited estate in New York State collapsed under the weight of unpaid debts and court-ordered foreclosures.
Despite a boyish love for 'reading novels and amusing tales', he did not begin to write fiction until he was thirty and only after the frustration of his ambitions as a gentleman farmer, frontier landlord, and mercantile investor.
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