James Fenimore Cooper

Who Was James Fenimore Cooper?

James Fenimore Cooper was the first major American novelist — the writer who established the conventions of American frontier fiction and created, in Natty Bumppo, one of the most enduring figures in the American literary imagination. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, he grew up on the frontier settlement of Cooperstown, New York, which his father had founded, and absorbed from his childhood the landscape and the stories that would fill his fiction.

His five Leatherstocking Tales — The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) — follow Natty Bumppo from youth to old age across the changing American frontier, tracing the conflict between wilderness and civilization, between the values of the natural man and the corruptions of social life.

Cooper is significant for TLA because his fiction raises, in the specific context of the American frontier, questions about the relationship between nature, civilization, and the sacred that have theological dimensions he does not fully articulate but cannot suppress. Natty Bumppo is a figure who stands between two worlds — the natural world of the Mohicans and the social world of the settlers — and belongs fully to neither. His loneliness is the loneliness of a creature made for something that neither world can provide.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Pioneers — 1823 — Leatherstocking Tales I
• The Last of the Mohicans — 1826 — Leatherstocking Tales II
• The Prairie — 1827 — Leatherstocking Tales III
• The Pathfinder — 1840 — Leatherstocking Tales IV
• The Deerslayer — 1841 — Leatherstocking Tales V