The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [2]
1827 The Prairie, the third novel in the Leatherstocking series, is published ; Natty Bumppo dies among the Indians west of the Mississippi, where he has been driven by the advancing line of pioneers.
1829 Cooper publishes Notions of the Americans, a reflection on his native land and one of six books he writes while living abroad.
1833 Cooper returns to the United States.
1834 Cooper writes A Letter to His Countrymen, in which he criticizes American provincialism and announces his retirement from writing fiction. He publishes Sketches of Switzerland, one of his many travel narratives.
1837 In response to hostile treatment in the Whig press, Cooper instigates a series of libel suits, in which he remains entangled for years to come.
1838 Feeling financial strain, Cooper resumes fiction writing with Home as Found and Homeward Bound, which combine adventure with reflections on American society. On the so-called Trail of Tears, thousands of Cherokee Indians die during their removal from ancestral lands in Georgia.
1839 Cooper publishes The History of the Navy of the United States of America. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published.
1840 The Pathfinder, the fourth Leatherstocking book, appears; it takes place in 1760 during the French and Indian War.
1841 Cooper publishes The Deerslayer, the last of the Leatherstocking Tales; it describes Natty Bumppo’s youth, when Natty and his friend live with the Delaware Indians and fight the Hurons.
1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by Douglass, appears.
1846 Cooper publishes Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers.
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.
1851 James Fenimore Cooper dies in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851.
INTRODUCTION
James Fenimore Cooper’s literary reputation has undergone striking vicissitudes over the years. Hailed in his lifetime ( 1789-1851 ) as America’s first great novelist and lionized throughout the Western world, he fell into the literary doldrums at the end of the nineteenth century (in his own country at least) and languished there for many years. So complete was his fall that he became almost an object of ridicule among critics and literary commissioners. Later generations found it hard to imagine that he had once been an icon in the American literary canon. More recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in Cooper and a reconsideration of his literary reputation.
His death in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851, and a memorial service held the next month in New York City brought tributes from Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Henry Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and other leading American men of letters. In Europe, Thackeray, Balzac, Goethe, Scott, Lafayette, Carlyle, Sand, and Sue were among the many admirers of Cooper’s writings. So were, later, Joseph Conrad, who paid tribute in particular to Cooper’s seafaring works, and D. H. Lawrence, who was so inspired by Cooper’s treatment of the frontier that he came to spend several years living in the American West. Cooper was probably even more popular in Europe than he was in his own country, and he earned much of the money he made as America’s first successful professional writer from overseas sales of his works.
A controversialist, Cooper provoked unease from his countrymen as well as veneration. His popularity waned after his return to America in 1833 from a seven-year absence spent traveling in Europe ; upon his return, he criticized the materialism and crassness he saw in America that had changed for the worse. He was not afraid to join in political fights and to hit back at enemies—he became something of a public scold in his later