What comes readily to mind are the portrayals of socially marginal figures as the essential Americans, the flight-and-rescue situations, the common theme of male bonding, and the reliance on “sub-literary” myths, popular culture, and regional color in the narrative.

Twain’s effort to break the hold of romanticism through his attack on Cooper fell victim itself to changing literary and social fashions. Some critics, who agreed with him in seeing inflated diction and technical flaws in Cooper’s writing, nonetheless assailed Twain for being virulently anti—Native American.4 Others took note of Twain’s own borrowings of Cooper’s plot devices. In a point-by-point rebuttal, Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist demolished most of Twain’s main contentions.5 The charge of the hundreds of errors in random pages could not be substantiated because Twain never gave page numbers or any indication of the edition of Cooper’s novel he claimed to be using. It was notoriously difficult in Cooper’s time to avoid compositional errors, and Cooper always made numerous changes in his manuscripts. Twain’s ridicule of Cooper’s ark in The Deerslayer was based on his own assumptions of the size of a canal boat in his own era, not on Cooper’s assumptions in an era when such boats were smaller. Twain’s satire is best viewed as fiction rather than as criticism—a companion piece, perhaps, to A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

If Twain’s version of Cooper is now seen as hyperbolic and a caricature, what place do we assign to Cooper in the American literary canon? What do Cooper’s works offer to the contemporary reader? By what critical standards can we assess so varied a corpus of literary works? Is Cooper’s major interest and contribution to be viewed more usefully in the light of his broader role in nation building and cultural development in the early republic than in the strictly literary merits of his novels? And what is Cooper’s relationship to his own time and to his country, this man who seemed to his contemporaries, as he seems to us now, so complex and contradictory?

To approach such questions, we must first look at Cooper’s life. James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789. the fifth and youngest son and the twelfth of thirteen children of William and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper.6 The family moved in the next year to Cooperstown in upstate New York, the town that had been founded by William Cooper in 1786 and named for him. William Cooper made a fortune in land speculation by acquiring the rights to a 40,000-acre land grant (known as the Croghan Patent) that adjoined Lake Otsego. Cooper became the first judge for the Court of Common Pleas for Otsego County. In 1795 and 1799 he was elected to Congress. Throughout the 1790s he was a formidable figure in Federalist politics in New York State, and was virtually the political boss of the western counties of the state. 7

Judge Cooper, however, made a series of critical mistakes at the end of the decade in fighting his political adversaries, and these mistakes led to his retirement from politics and also contributed to the dramatic reversal of the Federalists’ fortunes in New York State. Judge Cooper thereafter turned his energies to new land ventures farther upstate that ultimately proved to be ruinous to his heirs. After the death of his beloved daughter Hannah in 1800, Judge Cooper became more and more absorbed in his ill-fated new land speculations and business ventures. The business activities increasingly consumed his time and made him less and less accessible to his family. He died in Albany in 1809 of pneumonia—not from being struck on the head from behind by a political opponent, as the legend has it.8

Judge Cooper was unquestionably the patriarch of his family, and he sought to rule Cooperstown in much the same way that he ran his family. He provided generous and benevolent, if slightly dictatorial, leadership and expected deference in return. It appears that James Cooper’s relations with his father were somewhat strained, though the issue has not been completely resolved. William Cooper was a remote figure to his youngest son, and he apparently had not placed his highest hopes on James for bettering the family’s fortunes. Yet all of his children, including James, were given the benefit of private tutoring and educational opportunities. Judge Cooper, although not well-educated himself, had bettered himself by marrying an heiress, and believed strongly in raising his children to be genteel in the fashion of his wife’s well-to-do family and in the tradition of the privileged British landed gentry.

Although young James spent much of his childhood roaming the woods with his favorite brother William, he received private tutoring from the local schoolmaster his father hired to run the village school. At age ten he was sent to Albany to live with his father’s friend, the Reverend Thomas Ellison, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, to study the classics and to attend school. Among the small number of other pupils were the sons of wealthy Federalists—a Jay, a Livingston, and two Van Rensselaers. William Jay, the son of John Jay, was James’s roommate and became a lifelong friend. James Cooper loved Virgil and became highly proficient in Latin. After the death of Reverend Ellison, James went to New Haven to prepare for matriculation at Yale. When he entered Yale at the age of thirteen, he was far ahead of most of his classmates in his knowledge of Latin and the classics. This may help account for the boredom he felt at college.