^
1826 The Last of the Mohicans
is published
The Last of the
Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper is published. One of the earliest
distinctive American novels, the book is the second of the five-novel
series called the "Leather-stocking Tales." Cooper was born on 15
September 1789 in New Jersey and moved the following year to the frontier
in upstate New York, where his father founded frontier-town Coopersville.
Cooper attended Yale but joined the Navy after he was expelled for
a prank. When Cooper was about 20, his father died, and he became
financially independent. Having drifted for a decade, Cooper began
writing a novel after his wife challenged him to write something better
than he was reading at the moment. His first novel, Precaution, modeled
on Jane Austen, was not successful, but his second, The Spy, influenced
by the popular writings of Sir Walter Scott, became a bestseller,
making Cooper the first major American novelist. The story was set
during the American Revolution and featured George Washington as a
character. He continued to write about the American frontier in his
third book, The Pioneer, which featured backcountry scout Natty Bumppo,
known in this book as "Leather-stocking." The character, representing
goodness, purity, and simplicity, became tremendously popular, and
reappeared, by popular demand, in five more novels, known collectively
as the "Leather-stocking Tales." The second book in the series, The
Last of the Mohicans, is still widely read today. The five books span
Bumppo's life, from coming of age through approaching death. Cooper
died on 14 September 1851.
Ce
fils d'un riche membre du Congrès américain, est renvoyé de l'Université
de Yale pour avoir provoqué une explosion dans un cours de chimie.
Après avoir servit dans la marine, il devient fermier. C'est ce moment
qu'il choisit pour écrire. Il accède rapidement à la célébrité en
publiant des nouvelles et son chef d'œuvre Le Dernier des
Mohicans.
James Fenimore
Cooper was the first major US novelist, author of the novels of frontier
adventure known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the wilderness
scout called Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye. They include The
Pioneers (1823), The
Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827),
The
Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841).
Cooper's first fiction, Precaution
(1820), was a plodding imitation of Jane Austen's novels of English
gentry manners, investigating the ironic discrepancy between illusion
and reality. His second novel, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral
Ground (1821), was based on another British model, Sir Walter
Scott's "Waverley" novels, stories of adventure and romance, which
Cooper transfered to an American Revolutionary War setting, introducing
several distinctively American character types. Like Scott's novels,
The Spy is a drama of conflicting loyalties and interests
in which the action mirrors and expresses more subtle internal psychological
tensions. The Spy soon brought him international fame.
The first of the renowned "Leatherstocking"
tales, The
Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna (1823), followed
and adhered to the successful formula of The Spy, reproducing
its basic thematic conflicts and utilizing family traditions once
again. In The Pioneers, however, the traditions were those
of William Cooper of Cooperstown, who appears as Judge Temple of Templeton,
along with many other lightly disguised inhabitants of James's boyhood
village. No known prototype exists, however, for the novel's principal
character — the former wilderness scout Natty Bumppo, alias Leatherstocking.
The Leatherstocking of The Pioneers is an aged man, of rough
but sterling character, who ineffectually opposes "the march of progress,"
namely, the agricultural frontier and its chief spokesman, Judge Temple.
Fundamentally, the conflict is between rival versions of the American
Eden: the "God's Wilderness" of Leatherstocking and the cultivated
garden of Judge Temple. Since Cooper himself was deeply attracted
to both ideals, he was able to create a powerful and moving story
of frontier life. Indeed, The Pioneers is both the first
and finest detailed portrait of frontier life in American literature;
it is also the first truly original American novel.
Cooper
wrote a series of sequels (not written in their narrative order) in
which the entire life of the frontier scout was gradually unfolded.
The
Last of the Mohicans (1826) takes the reader back to the
French and Indian wars of Natty's middle age, when he is at the height
of his powers. That work was succeeded by The
Prairie (1827) in which, now very old and philosophical,
Leatherstocking dies, facing the westering sun he has so long followed.
Identified from the start with the vanishing wilderness and its natives,
Leatherstocking was an unalterably elegiac figure, wifeless and childless,
hauntingly loyal to a lost cause. This conception of the character
was not fully realized in The Pioneers, however, because
Cooper's main concern with depicting frontier life led him to endow
Leatherstocking with some comic traits and make his laments, at times,
little more than whines or grumbles. But in these sequels Cooper retreated
stylistically from a realistic picture of the frontier in order to
portray a more idyllic and romantic wilderness; by doing so he could
exploit the parallels between the American Indians and the forlorn
Celtic heroes of James Macpherson's pseudo-epic The Works of Ossian,
leaving Leatherstocking intact but slightly idealized and making extensive
use of Macpherson's imagery and rhetoric. [Poesie
di Ossian, tradotto da Melchiorre Cesarotti, zip]
Cooper intended to bury Leatherstocking
in The Prairie, but many years later he resuscitated the
character and portrayed his early maturity in The
Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea (1840) and his youth in The
Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath (1841). These novels, in
which Natty becomes the centre of romantic interest for the first
time, carry the idealization process further. In The Pathfinder
he is explicitly described as an American Adam, while in The Deerslayer
he demonstrates his fitness as a warrior-saint by passing a series
of moral trials and revealing a keen, though untutored, aesthetic
sensibility.
Cooper continued
to write many other volumes of fiction and nonfiction. His fourth
novel, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823), inaugurated a
series of sea novels, which were at once as popular and influential
as the "Leatherstocking" tales. And they were more authentic. Herman
Melville and Joseph Conrad rightly admired and learned from them,
in particular The Red Rover (1827) and The Sea Lions
(1849). Never before in prose fiction had the sea become not merely
a theatre for, but the principal actor in, moral drama that celebrated
man's courage and skill at the same time that it revealed him humbled
by the forces of God's nature. As developed by Cooper, and later by
Melville, the sea novel became a powerful vehicle for spiritual as
well as moral exploration. Not satisfied with mere fictional treatment
of life at sea, Cooper also wrote a meticulously researched, highly
readable History of the Navy of the United States of America
(1839).
Through his novels, most
notably The Bravo (1831), and other more openly polemical
writings, Cooper attacked the corruption and tyranny of oligarchical
regimes in Europe.
The public
was not interested in Cooper's acute political treatise, The American
Democrat (1838), or in such political satires as The Monikins
(1835) or Home As Found (1838). And though he wrote some
of his best romances — particularly the later "Leatherstocking"
tales and Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts (1845)
— during the last decade of his life, profits from publishing
so diminished that he gained little benefit from improved popularity.
Though his circumstances were never straitened, he had to go on writing;
and some of the later novels, such as Mercedes of Castile
(1840) or Jack Tier; or, The Florida Reef (1846-48), were
mere hack work.
COOPER ONLINE: |
| The
Last of the Mohicans
The
Last of the Mohicans
The
Last of the Mohicans
The
Deerslayer
The
Lake Gun
The Lake Gun |
The Prairie
New York
New
York
The Pathfinder
The
Pathfinder
The
Pioneers
The Pioneers |
Autobiography
of a Pocket-Handkerchief
Autobiography
of a Pocket-Handkerchief
Tales for Fifteen, or, Imagination and Heart
Tales
for Fifteen
editor of Susan Fenimore Cooper's
Elinor
Wyllys volume 1
Elinor
Wyllys volume 2 |
Other novels of James Fenimore Cooper.
Lionel Lincoln (1824); The Wept
of Wish-ton-Wish (1829); The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas
(1830); Homeward Bound (1838); Home As Found (1838); The Two Admirals
(1842); The Wing-and-Wing; or, Le Feu-follet (1842); Wyandotté; or,
The Hutted Knoll (1843); Ned Myers (1843); Afloat and Ashore (1844);
The Chain-Bearer (1845); The Redskins: or, Indian and Injin (1846);
The Crater: or, Vulcan's Peak (1847); The Sea Lions (1849); The Ways
of the Hour (1850), The Heidenmauer, Precaution.
Other
works:
Notions
of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828); A Letter
to His Countrymen (1834); Sketches of Switzerland (1836); Gleanings
in Europe (1837) |
1825 Myles Birket Foster, British painter who died on 27
March 1899. — LINKS
1802 Mark Hopkins, US educator and theologian who died
on 17 June 1887.
1799 João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida,
escritor y político portugués.
1747 Tadeusz Kosciusko,
Poland, patriot, (New York Bridge)
1688 Pierre de Marivaux,
Paris.
1524 Luís Vaz de Camões, primer poeta épico
portugués. |
On
a February 04:
41 BULLETS FIRED AT CLOSE RANGE.
He was the world's highest paid musician and pianist. He wrote Liberace
Cooks, Liberace (1972), The Things I love (1976), and
The Wonderful Private World of Liberace (1986).
Finns take western 'motti' at Lemetti 
