Great American Writers Author:W. P. Trent, John Erskine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: matchable in the more pretentious work of his contemporaries. CHAPTER III JAMES FENIMOKE COOPER The psychological, introspective turn which, as we have ... more »seen, Charles Brockden Brown gave to the early American novel, was lost for a while in the development it received at the hands of James Fenimore Cooper. All of Brown that could survive in that virile unreflecting genius was the interest in the Indian, and the truthful portrait of the American landscape. But even for these Cooper went, not to Brown, but to his own experience. With Brown he is linked only by the common patriotic desire to celebrate their country in literature. His boyhood and his active life supplied him with all his materials, so that in his best work he owes practically nothing to any foreign inspiration. Cooper was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789. His father, Judge William Cooper, was of a Quaker family; his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, was of Swedish descent. He was the eleventh of their twelve children. The Judge had bought a large estate in New York, on Otsego Lake, andthere he removed in 1790, and devoted himself to colonizing the country. What his occupation was, and incidentally his aggressive personality and his innate literary gift, are all amply disclosed in a series of letters he wrote, and had published in Dublin, to encourage emigration to his lands. Perhaps only a hardy soul would care to attempt the rough life he describes. In his settlement the less reputable element of society, or at least the unconventional element, set the tone;,] in spite of his effort to rule with old-world decorum, it was at best a frontier town. The faithful portrait of it, even of the Judge's house, is in The Pioneers. Here Cooper spent his boyhood, until his father sent him to study under t...« less