1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The simple Quaker boy, 'Jem Cooper' could use a bit more ballast", August 24, 2009
This review is from: James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (Hardcover)
"James Cooper" he was born and named in 1789. "James FENIMORE Cooper" he was renamed by the New York Legislature in 1836. He died in 1855. In JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS, University of Connecticut Professor of English Wayne Franklin takes his subject from birth to departure with family for seven years in Europe in 1826. Still only 36 years old when he sailed from Manhattan June 1, 1836, the young author had just published THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
The Last of the Mohicans (Tantor Unabridged Classics), his sixth novel. Its five predecessors, beginning in 1820 were PRECAUTION
Precaution, THE SPY
The Spy, THE PIONEERS
The Pioneers (Signet Classics), THE PILOT
The pilot: a tale of the sea. By James Fenimore Cooper. Illustrated from drawings by F. O. C. Darley. AND LIONEL LINCOLN
Lionel Lincoln (The Works of James Fenimore Cooper: Mohawk Edition). He had also issued TALES FOR FIFTEEN
Imagination and Heart, Tales for Fifteen, a book of short stories, under the pseudonym Jane Morgan.
Cooper had first visited Europe 20 years earlier as a young merchant seaman. He had then been a US naval officer just before the War of 1812. He had recently turned down Secretary of State Henry Clay's offer of appointment as Minister to Sweden/Norway (Cooper sensed too much unavoidable work, distracting from his writing!) while accepting from President John Quincy Adams a sinecure: undemanding, revenue-producing commission as American consul at the newly created post in Lyons, France.
If you read nothing more of this impressive scholarly tome, at least dig into its packed 23 page "Introduction." From its first paragraph you are reminded that "James Fenimore Cooper (1789 -1851) remains one of the most original yet most misunderstood figures in the history of American culture. Almost single-handedly in the 1820s Cooper invented the key forms of American fiction -- the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary romance. ... Furthermore, in producing and shrewdly marketing fully 10 percent of all American novels in the 1820s, most of them best sellers, Cooper made it possible for other aspiring authors to earn a living by their writings" (xi).
Cooper was also (Introduction, xxxi) a "representative" man, a creature of his age of marked economic anxiety. Indeed, the economy, especially Cooper's debts inherited from his father, Judge William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, drives the biography. Until recently, the Cooper estate held back from scholars many of Cooper's papers. Wayne Franklin happily draws upon them to demonstrate the Angst that drove Cooper year after year to look for paths to financial stability: real estate, whaling off the coast of Brazil and finally writing. Cooper seemed, barely, to hold poverty at bay, but at his death, his survivors had to scramble to make ends meet. An earlier biographer had portrayed James Fenimore Cooper as a wealthy gentleman of leisure who dabbled in literature as a pastime. Not so.
Towards the end of his narrative of his subject's first 36 years (Chapter 16, "Literary Business," pp. 510 - 512), Professor Franklin lays out how James Cooper legally added Fenimore to his name. His mother had long ago asked him to assume her family's name. In February 1826 he petitioned the New York Legislature, in effect, to authorize him to create a new family name for himself: Fenimore-Cooper. Somehow this was misunderstood in legislative committee to be a request simply for an additional middle name, Fenimore, as surname. By May 1826 the Legislature had made its change, not Cooper's!
Biographer Franklin speculates that the new name expressed for James Fenimore Cooper, as he now was, a "sense of new beginnings." With many hitherto humiliating court proceedings over his father's estate finally decided more or less to his liking, Cooper had at last simplified and gotten a hold on his finances. His wildly popular novels had given him a new, advanced social status not unworthy of his patrician wife Susan's DeLancey family. "The simple Quaker boy, 'Jem Cooper' could use a bit more ballast" (512f). Hence Fenimore.
Do not expect quick, painless profit from perusing JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS, especially if you do not already have a lot of Cooper's writing under your belt, more especially his first six novels. This is a book by a Cooper scholar for other scholars and for serious students of English and American literature. It is minutely detailed as to Cooper's finances. It bristles with digressions into the lives seemingly of every relative, friend or foe Cooper had up until 1826. In some ways, THE EARLY YEARS is an encyclopedia. It demands and deserves re-reading. But first, you had better read plenty of James Fenimore Cooper! -OOO-
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
