James Fenimore Cooper

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James Fenimore Cooper about 1850
James Fenimore Cooper.
Painting by John Wesley Jarvis , 1822.

James Fenimore Cooper (* 15. September 1789 in Burlington , New Jersey as James Cooper ; † 14. September 1851 in Cooperstown , New York ) was an American writer of romance .

Cooper is a key figure in American literature in many ways . Alongside Washington Irving , he was the first American writer who could make a living from his books. It remained the most widely read in Europe well into the 20th century. Following the example of Sir Walter Scott , he wrote the first historical novels and the first nautical novels in American literature. His extensive work also includes numerous historiographical works, essays and satires about America and Europe. His five “ Leatherstocking ” novels, which deal with the opening up of the American West by white scouts , trappers and settlers, but also the gradual suppression and destruction of Indian culture , are particularly well-known to this day .

Life

youth

James F. Cooper statue in Cooperstown

Cooper was born on September 15, 1789, the twelfth of 13 children to a wealthy Quaker family; only four of his brothers and two of his sisters reached adulthood. His father William Cooper , at the time of James' birth still a shopkeeper in Burlington, New Jersey, had been able to increase the family fortune considerably through successful land speculation: in 1786, under legally dubious circumstances, he acquired a land patent for more than 12,000 hectares on the shores of Otsego Lake in the state New York, which at that time was still on the frontier , in other words in the borderland between the lands already populated by whites in the east and the as yet undeveloped areas in the west. In the next few years he sold parts of his property to Neusiedler and pushed ahead with the establishment of a pioneer settlement on the lake shore. In 1790 he and his family settled in the settlement named in his honor Cooperstown . Over time, he became one of the wealthiest and most politically influential men in New York City. 1795–1797 and 1799–1801 he held a mandate in the House of Representatives of the United States and worked as a member of the Federalist Party, among other things and quite selfishly, for the ratification of the Jay Treaty .

James Cooper - it was not until 1826 that he added the maiden name of his mother Elizabeth Fenimore to his name - spent the first years of his life in a landscape that was no longer as untouched as he was later to portray it in his novels, but still quite original. As a boy he spent a lot of time in the woods and often sailed or rowed on the lake. The Coopers' family seat, called Otsego Hall , was the most stately building in the settlement and, for the conditions on the frontier, an at least comfortable, if not luxurious, place to live.

He first attended the local village school until his parents gave him in 1801 for further education as a house pupil with the Episcopalian clergyman Thomas Ellison in Albany , the capital of the state, in care. There he learned mainly Latin together with offspring of other New York patrician families such as the van Rensselaers. When Ellison died a year later, Cooper enrolled at Yale College in New Haven at the age of only thirteen , which at the time was more like a high school. There, however, he was quite bored with his studies and was expelled from school after less than a year for gross mischief. The story is often spread that he taught a donkey to sit on a professor's chair, and he is said to have blown open the locked door to a fellow student's room with gunpowder.

Life at sea

William Cooper decided that his son would pursue a career in the Navy and had him hired on a ship in the American Merchant Navy in preparation. In October, James Cooper set out on his first year-long sea voyage as a common seaman aboard the Stirling . On this trip he got to know England and Spain; off the coast of Portugal, his ship was pursued by North African pirates ( barbarians ) for days .

After his return to America, he entered the navy on January 1, 1808 at the age of 18 as a midshipman (ensign at sea); his certificate of appointment was personally signed by President Thomas Jefferson . Cooper was initially used on sailing ships of the American Navy in the Atlantic. From August 1808 to October 1809 he was stationed at Fort Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario , which had played an important role in the French and Indian War. Faced with an impending war with Great Britain, under whose control the northern Canadian shores of the lake, the United States sought to build a fleet on this inland lake and began building the brig USS Oneida in Oswego in 1808 . Cooper quickly earned the trust of Garrison Commander Lt. Melanchthon Taylor Woolsey and was ultimately entrusted with the management of the fort and the shipyard work when Woolsey was recalled to Lake Champlain . In November 1809, Cooper was then transferred to New York Harbor , where he was employed as a recruiter.

In December 1809, his father died - according to a common but unlikely version of the assassination attempt by a political opponent - leaving each of his sons $ 50,000 and one-fifth of his estates valued at $ 700,000. If he was financially more than secure, this was all the more the case when, on New Year's Day 1811, he married Susan Augusta De Lancey, who came from one of the most influential New York landowning families. Her grandfather James DeLancey was royal governor of the colony from 1753–1755, and his sons played prominent roles in the ranks of the loyalists in the American Revolution and the War of Independence . Cooper's ancestors, on the other hand, fought on the side of the revolutionaries, and the continuing tensions of the revolutionary era, which brought neighbors, friends and family members against each other, he later processed in historical novels such as The Spy .

Beginnings as a writer

At the express request of his wife, Cooper ended his nautical career and tried his luck as a farmer over the next few years. Between 1815 and 1819 the couple had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. In the various places in which he and his family settled - first in New Rochelle , then again in Cooperstown, in 1817 in Westchester County , which was dominated by the DeLanceys - he was involved in local institutions such as the parish and the civic militia and acted accordingly to his Self- image as a gentleman hobby horses like landscaping and maintaining his library.

This rather idyllic existence was soon overshadowed by the foreseeable collapse of the family fortune. The Coopers' land had depreciated significantly in the Depression of the 1810s. James Cooper's brothers had jeopardized their inheritance in land speculations, and when the last three of his brothers and mother died in quick succession in 1818–1819, they left James Cooper mostly mortgages; the family seat Otsego Hall had to be sold. To stay afloat, Cooper embarked on a series of high-risk endeavors; So he bought a whaler and personally supervised the equipment before its ocean voyage, but this business idea did not prove to be profitable either.

Cooper's idea of ​​writing a novel may also have arisen from the lack of money. According to his daughter, Susan Cooper, who wrote numerous introductions to his novels after his death, Cooper's debut was the result of a bet. He leafed through a Schmonzette probably imported from England , which his wife Elizabeth had liked, and is said to have exclaimed: “Even I could write a better book than this!” The result, Precaution , published in 1820, is a decidedly wooden imitation of English social novels Jane Austen and in its sentimentality, its improbable plot, but especially through its moralizing impetus, comes dangerously close to the trash form of this genre, the dime novel . The novel was published anonymously, and in England, where a second edition was soon to be found, it was generally assumed that the author must be English. So Cooper had succeeded in asserting himself in a domain dominated by a “damn mob of squabbling women” (according to Hawthorne ), the market of sentimental fiction . In 1823 Cooper published two short stories under the pseudonym "Jane Morgan", and at least Leslie Fiedler found Cooper's travesty "a bit unsettling."

Encouraged by the success of his debut, Cooper soon wrote his first historical novel. The Spy (German "The Spy") was a great success on both sides of the Atlantic and was translated into several European languages. Today it is regarded as the first important historical novel in American literature, especially as the first whose plot is also set on American soil - it proved against all claims to the contrary that American subjects were also suitable for dramatization in novels. Cooper's merit and his success with his contemporaries are related to the American nation's need for political and cultural legitimation, which became particularly urgent in 1821 after Sydney Smith asked in a frequently quoted article in the Edinburgh Review : “Who in all Is the world already reading an American book, or going to an American play, or looking at a picture or a sculpture from America? ” Especially in his home country, but also in France, Cooper was soon celebrated as the“ American Scott ”.

In order to get closer to the pulse of the literary business, Cooper moved to the city of New York in 1821, where he soon came to the core with other great minds such as the bookseller Charles Wiley (the progenitor of the publishing dynasty John Wiley & Sons ) and the painter and writer William Dunlap a literary salon called The Bread and Cheese. His financial situation remained precarious, however, and in 1823 he was only able to avert the auction of his household by the bailiff with difficulty. It certainly had an effect on the incredible speed with which Cooper wrote novels until the end of his life. The Pioneers appeared in 1823 , the first of his five leather stocking novels, in 1824 the immensely successful The Pilot , the first of a long series of nautical novels, and in 1826 Cooper's most successful novel The Last of The Mohicans " The last of the Mohicans ." In 1823 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Europe trip

When Cooper felt that he was adequately protected, he set off for Europe with his family and servants in June 1826. The Grand Tour , originally an institution serving the upbringing and edification of European aristocrats, also enjoyed growing popularity among the bourgeoisie, and Cooper, in his self-image as a gentleman and member of the cultural and social elite, was one of the first Americans to see it as befitting To visit centers of European high culture.

After a short stay in London, the family settled in Paris, from where Cooper traveled a lot, including England and Holland. From July to October 1828 the family lived in Bern's Lorraine district , from where Cooper went on extensive hikes into the Oberland and the Alps. The Coopers then traveled over the Simplon Pass via Northern Italy to Florence , where they resided in the Palazzo Ricasoli Firidolfi until July 1829 . In the course of the next few months they went via Naples , Sorrento , Ischia and Rome to Venice and in May 1830 after a detour via Dresden back to Paris, where the Coopers again settled permanently until 1833. Another trip in the summer of 1832 took Cooper to Belgium, from there via Cologne up the Rhine Valley to Schaffhausen and from there via Zurich to Vevey .

Upon his arrival in Paris, Cooper was amazed at the good reputation he enjoyed in French literary circles. He was passed around the salons and made friends with numerous great minds. In November 1826 it was the literary sensation of the year when he, the "American Scott", appeared together with Sir Walter Scott in the salon of Princess Galitzin. During his time in Paris he had a particularly close friendship with his compatriot Samuel FB Morse and with the Marquis de La Fayette , who had fought on the side of the revolutionaries in the American War of Independence and thus became a symbol of American-French friendship. Cooper saw himself in Europe as the ambassador of the American Republic and was soon involved in political debates in Europe during the Restoration period . As early as 1828 he wrote a report on La Fayette's trip to America. Notions of the Americans (1828) was intended to educate the European public about misunderstandings regarding the republican constitution of America and got him to an exuberant eulogy to his homeland, to the classic formulation of the American Dream . He got into the turmoil of French politics with the July Revolution . Cooper also openly supported the Poles' struggle for freedom in the November uprising and became friends with Adam Mickiewicz .

During his time in Europe, Cooper continued to write novel after novel at an undiminished pace. The Prairie was published in 1827 , the third and, for the time being, last of the leather stocking novels. Then in 1828 the nautical novel The Red Rover , which became a great success on both sides of the Atlantic. In Sorrento, in 1829, he wrote The Water-Witch , another nautical novel that is set in the Long Island Sound of the 17th century, but whose atmosphere is clearly Mediterranean due to the place where it was written. In the same year he wrote the historical novel The Wept of Wish-ton- Wish about New England colonial history. He also kept detailed diaries and published five volumes of travel sketches on Switzerland, England, France and Italy from 1836–1838.

Late years

Cooper around 1850.
Photograph by Mathew Brady .

From 1826 to 1833 Cooper stayed in Europe, engaged in social studies, defended American democracy in socially critical writings and, in The Bravo (1831) , dealt with the feudal past, among other things. Among other things, he was consul of the United States in Lyon . When he returned to the USA, he changed more and more from a supporter of America to a critic of America. His skepticism towards industrial capitalism - which was already hinted at in the first of his leatherstocking novels - he articulated in various critical writings and satires, for example A Letter to his Countrymen (1834), The American Democrat (1838). Sharp, sometimes insulting attacks against everything and everyone, combined with various legal processes, sapped his reputation and his creativity. Some of his works published after 1842 ( The Redskins 1846) can be described as strongly tendentious towards an idealization of the latifundists . He no longer achieved the mastery of his earlier works.

Critical appraisal

It is considered Cooper's merit to have established the historical novel in American literature after the gifted Charles Brockden Brown was unsuccessful. Here he was based on the Scottish writer Walter Scott . Through the skillful selection of historical events in which the young American state gained fame and honor in the eyes of its citizens (Revolutionary War, Second Anglo-American War), he strengthened American national feeling and patriotism with his novels. This, too, is considered essential to the success that his books have had with the readership. Also to be emphasized is Cooper's endeavor to make the Indian characters in the wildslayer novels realistic, neither as “noble savages” nor as inferior, even if the result sometimes seems half-hearted.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe read The Pioneers in 1826 and then, in quick succession, read other Cooper novels available in Weimar in the original. He praised the writer's independent talent. Even Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo are very positive.

Cover illustration for leather stocking. Five stories, based on JF Cooper , "freely edited by Oskar Häcker for the dear youth." Around 1885.

Cooper's novels are not appealing because of their art of speaking, but rather because of their broad, captivating plot. However, the philosophy that is expressed in his works (and which was honored by Ludwig Börne, for example ) is often misunderstood : Already in “The Pioneers”, the judge Temple and Lederstrumpf stand together against the immoral manner with which the settlers deal with nature treat as if their treasures are inexhaustible. At the same time, however, they are in conflict because the judge represents positive law (civilization), while Leatherstocking represents natural law. Cooper thus vividly portrayed a fundamental conflict in early America. Critics of his work cite the often seemingly adventurous accumulation of coincidences in the plot, the unconvincing portrayal of the female characters and the sometimes grotesquely contrived dialogues of the heroes of the novel as weaknesses. Even Mark Twain expressed negative criticism of Cooper's works ( "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper" ). All of this did not detract from the global success of his novels. After all, authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville are among his successors.

With Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe he shares the fate of being “only” considered to be a young adult author.

Works

Excursion in Italy , 1838

Novels (first editions)

  • Precaution, A Novel. AT Goodrich & Co., New York 1820.
  • The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground . Wiley and Halstead, New York 1821.
    • (German) The spy
  • The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale. Charles Wiley, New York 1823.
  • The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea. Charles Wiley, New York 1824.
  • Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston. Charles Wiley, New York 1825.
  • The Last of the Mohicans. A Narrative of 1757. Carey, Lea and Carey, Philadelphia 1826.
  • The Prairie: A Tale. Carey, Lea and Carey, Philadelphia 1827.
  • The Red Rover: A Tale. Carey, Lea and Carey, Philadelphia 1827.
    • (German) Numerous translations and adaptations for the youth, Der Rote Freibeuter or Der Rote Seeräuber
  • The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish: A Tale. Carey, Lea and Carey, Philadelphia 1829.
    • (German by Arno Schmidt ): Conanchet or Die Beweinte by Wish-Ton-Wish , Goverts, Stuttgart 1962.
  • The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas: A Tale. Carey and Lea, Philadelphia 1830.
  • The Bravo: A Tale. Carey and Lea, Philadelphia 1831.
  • The pagan wall; or, The Benedictines: A Legend of the Rhine. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1832.
  • The Headsman; or, The Abbayye des Vignerons: A Tale. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1833.
  • The Monikins. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1835.
    • (German from Robert Wohlleben ): The Monikins. A Mar , ed. And epilogue: Christian Huck, 2 volumes, Achilla Presse Verlagbuchhandlung, Butjadingen / London / Cooperstown 2009.
    • (German by Robert Becker and Wolfgang Breidenstein): The Monikins. Newly translated and provided with an afterword by Robert Becker and Wolfgang Breidenstein, Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2012.
  • Homeward bound; or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1838.
  • Home as Found. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1838.
  • The Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1840.
  • The Deerslayer; or, The First War-Path: A Tale. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1841.
  • The Two Admirals: A Tale. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1842.
  • The Wing-and-Wing: or Le Feu-Follet: A Tale. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1842.
  • Wyandotté; or, The Hutted Knoll: A Tale. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1843.
  • Afloat and Ashore; or, The Adventures of Miles Wallingford. Philadelphia: 1844. [self-published]
  • Afloat and Ashore , Part 2, Burgess, Stringer, New York 1844.
  • Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony . Burgess, Stringer, New York 1845.
    • (German by Arno Schmidt): Satanstoe. Pictures from the American past. Volume I, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1976.
  • The Chainbearer; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts. Burgess, Stringer, New York 1845.
    • (German by Arno Schmidt): A thousand mornings. Pictures from the American past. Volume II, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1977.
  • The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin: Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts. Burgess, Stringer, New York 1846.
    • Carl Kolb, Ravensnest, or, Die Rothhäute: a short story , 1854, (digitized version )
    • (German by Arno Schmidt): The Reds. Pictures from the American past. Volume III, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak: A Tale of the Pacific. Burgess, Stringer, New York 1847.
    • Carl Spindler, The Marcus Reef or the Crater , 1848, (digitized)
  • Jack animal; or The Florida Reef . Burgess, Stringer, New York 1848.
  • The Oak Openings; or, The Bee-Hunter. Burgess, Stringer, New York 1848.
  • The Sea Lions; or, The Lost Sealers. Stringer, Townsend, New York 1849.
  • The Ways of the Hour: A Tale. GP Putnam, New York 1850.

Other works

  • Tales for Fifteen; or, Imagination and Heart. Charles Wiley, New York 1823.
  • Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Traveling Bachelor. Carey, Lea and Carey, Philadelphia 1828.
  • A Letter to His Countymen. John Wiley: New York, 1834.
  • Sketches of Switzerland 2 volumes. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1836-1837.
  • Gleanings in Europe: (France). Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1837.
  • Gleanings in Europe: England. Carey, Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1838.
  • The American Democrat: or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. H. & E. Phinney, Cooperstown NY, 1838.
  • The Chronicles of Cooperstown. H. & E. Phinney, Cooperstown NY, 1838.
  • The History of the Navy of the United States of America. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1839.
  • Le Mouchoir: An Autobiographical Romance. Wilson & Co., Brother Jonathan Press, New York 1843.
  • Ned Myers; or, A Life before the Mast. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia 1843.
    • Carl Spindler, Edward Myers, or Memories from the Life of a Sailor , 1844, (digitized)
    • Ned Myers or A life in front of the mast , commented new translation, e-dition www.lex-icon.eu, Cologne 2012.
    • Ned Myers or A Life Before the Mast . Translated from the American and edited by Alexander Pechmann. mareverlag, Hamburg 2014, 3rd edition 2017. ISBN 978-3-86648-190-9 .
  • The Battle of Lake Erie. H. & E. Phinney, Cooperstown NY, 1843.
  • The Cruise of the Somers. J. Winchester, New York 1844.
  • Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers. Carey and Hart, Philadelphia 1846.

literature

Secondary literature

Monographs and edited volumes

  • Henry Walcott Boynton: James Fenimore Cooper . The Century Company, New York 1931.
  • Marcel Clavel : Fenimore Cooper: Sa Vie et son Œuvre: La Jeunesse (1789–1826). Imprimerie Universitaire de Provence, Aix-en-Provence 1938.
  • Donald Darnell: James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners . Newark, Univ. of Delaware, 1993
  • George Dekker: James Fenimore Cooper: the American Scott. Barnes & Noble, New York 1967.
  • George Dekker (Ed.), John P. Williams (Ed.): James Fenimore Cooper . Taylor & Francis, Critical Heritage Series, 2002 (criticism collection)
  • Wayne Franklin: James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. Yale University Press, New Haven 2007.
  • Wayne Franklin: The New World of James Fenimore Cooper. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  • James Grossman: James Fenimore Cooper: A Biographical and Critical Study. Stanford University Press, 1949.
  • Thomas R. Lounsbury: James Fenimore Cooper. 6th edition. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886 (American Men of Letters). ( Digitized version : 11 MB PDF in the Arno Schmidt reference library )
  • Ernest H. Redekop (Ed.): James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1989: Bicentennial Essays . Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 20, No. 3 (Special Edition, Winter 1989), ISSN 0007-7720
  • Donald A. Rings: James Fenimore Cooper. Updated edition. Twayne Publishers, Boston MA 1988.
  • WB Shubrick Clymer: James Fenimore Cooper. Haskell House Publishers, New York 1968, first published 1900.
  • Robert Spiller : Fenimore Cooper, Critic of his Times. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1931.
  • WM Verhoeven: James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts . Rodopi, 1993
  • Craig White: Student Companion to James Fenimore Cooper . Greenwood, 2006

Essays

  • Howard Mumford Jones : James Fenimore Cooper and the Hudson River School. In: Magazine of Art. 45, October 1952, pp. 243-251.
  • Howard Mumford Jones: Prose and Pictures: James Fenimore Cooper. In: Tulane Studies in English. 3, 1952, pp. 133-154.
  • DH Lawrence : Fenimore Cooper's White Novels and Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels. In: English Review. February and March 1919. Revised version in: DH Lawrence: Studies in Classic American Literature. Thomas Seltzer, New York 1923. (digitized version)
  • Mark Twain : Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

General accounts of American literary history with reviews of Cooper's work

  • Marius Bewley : The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. Chatto, London 1959.
  • Leslie Fiedler : Love and Death in the American Novel. Criterion Books, New York 1960.
  • Vernon Louis Parrington : Main Currents in American Thought. Volume 2: 1800-1860, The Romantic Revolution in America . Harcourt Brace & Co., New York 1927.
  • Henry Nash Smith : Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth. Random House, New York 1950. (digitized version)
  • Robert Spiller : The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical Criticism. Macmillan, New York 1955.
  • Yvor Winters : Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism. New Directions, Norfolk CN 1938.

Web links

Commons : James Fenimore Cooper  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

E-texts

Wikisource: James Fenimore Cooper  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Susan Fenimore Cooper: Small Family Memories (1883). In: Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper. Haskell House Publishers, 1922, p. 38 ( excerpt (English) in the Google book search)
  2. ^ Member History: James F. Cooper. American Philosophical Society, accessed June 27, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, James Fenimore
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1789
PLACE OF BIRTH Burlington , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1851
Place of death Cooperstown , New York