James Fenimore Cooper :: essays research papers

James Fenimore make was natural in Burlington, unfermented 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 realised the bunchtlement of Cooperstown at the head of Susquehanna River.&type A9Cooper accompanied a private preparatory school at Albany, New York, and was accordingly admitted to Yale in 1803. He was expelled from there during his junior year because of a misfortunate prank. His family allowed him to join the navy as a midshipman, but he curtly found that more discipline was present in the Navy than at Yale. In 1810 Cooper took a furlough, and never returned to active duty.&9After Coopers father passed in 1809, he received a comminuted inheritance. Cooper quickly squandered his inheritance, and at thirty was on the border of bankruptcy. He decided to try his hand at writing as a career. Carefully modeling his work after Sir Wa lter 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 terzetto keep back, 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 charter 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 garrison at Fort William total heat and a fictional kidnapping of dickens pioneer sisters. Cooper knew hardly a(prenominal) Indians, so he drew on a Moravian missionarys account of two opposing tribes the Delawares and the "Mingos." Although this characterization was filled with inaccuracies, the dual image of the opposing tribes allowed Cooper to create a lasting image of the Indian that became a let on of the American consciousness for almost two centuries. His public was simultaneously stirred romantically at the doomed Indians fate and justified in abetting their extermination. The zep of the novel, Natty Bumppo, was incredibly popular, a rebel heroically opposed to industrial society, he was a hero who never married or changed his ideals.&9Cooper was a prolific writer, publishing 32 novels, 12 works of nonfiction, a play and numerous pamphlets and articles.