"Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund"--Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 523-679) and index.
""Contents""; ""ACKNOWLEDGMENTS""; ""INTRODUCTION""; ""ONE: The Vision""; ""TWO: Lessons""; ""THREE The Voyage of the Stirling""; ""FOUR Midshipman James Cooper""; ""FIVE Love and War""; ""SIX Fenimore Farm""; ""SEVEN Gains and Losses""; ""EIGHT A Better Book""; ""NINE An American Tale""; ""TEN Legal Troubles""; ""ELEVEN Settlement""; ""TWELVE Taking Manhattan""; ""THIRTEEN Old Tales and New""; ""FOURTEEN Legends""; ""FIFTEEN Hawk-eye""; ""SIXTEEN Literary Business""; ""NOTES""; ""INDEX""
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) invented the key forms of American fiction - the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain, who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his 'literary offenses'. His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Cooper's fictions traced native losses to their economic sources. Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Cooper's life to be based on full access to his family papers. Cooper's life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavours, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, "James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years" covers Cooper's life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.
JSTOR
OverDrive, Inc.
22573/ctt114qrb
237A3998-D436-42A1-B2BE-35C49C56E27E
James Fenimore Cooper.
0300108052
Cooper, James Fenimore,1789-1851-- Childhood and youth.