Cooper james fenimore biography of mahatma
However, the last period of his writing sheds light on his own experiences, which he documented in his works, The Pathfinder and The Two Admirals and Wing-and-Wing. James Cooper is known as the romantic writer of his age. His writings emphasize natural beauty , individuality, reliance on emotions, and the inherent goodness of humanity. His writings carry varied themes from history to art, culture, life, and romance.
Other techniques that he used in his works include disguises, chase, and pursuit, characterization , strong and sensual imagery , mysterious happenings, foreshadowing , and allusions. His works not only touched the hearts of the audience but also impacted the writers and critics alike. Cooper was born and raised in the border town of Cooperstown, which was founded by his father, W.
He studied at Yale University and served in the navy. In , after getting married, he dedicated himself to his family and to the agricultural and socio-political interests of Cooperstown. In , Cooper wrote a traditional moral novel called "Precaution" for his daughters. Discovering his talent as a storyteller, he then wrote "The Spy" in , a novel based on local legends.
This novel gained international recognition, leading Cooper to move with his family to New York, where he soon became a prominent literary figure and leader of writers advocating for the uniqueness of American literature. Though his novels is tied with the mythic dimension they are never far removed from historical reality. The romantic vein, he preferred enhanced the historically, partly subdued in the mythic dimension of reality.
In , Cooper's first novel Precaution was published which was much more influenced by Jane Austen's novels. It was a great breakthrough for him which brought him name and fame. In , The Pioneers was published in which he has depicted the frontier adventure and the pioneer life influenced by his twenty years of experience. He wrote a chain of sea adventures, starting from The Pilot , a genuine American sea tale about the exploits of John Paul Jones.
The Last of the Mohicans Novel. Toggle navigation. Faced with competition from younger writers and magazine serialization, and lower prices for books resulting from new technologies, Cooper simply wrote more in his last decade than in either of the previous two. Half of his thirty-two novels were written in the s. They may be grouped into three categories: Indian romances, maritime fiction, and political and social controversy—though the categories often overlap.
Cooper james fenimore biography of mahatma
The s began with the last two novels featuring Natty Bumppo, both critical and reader successes: The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer Wyandotte , his last novel set in the Revolutionary War, followed in and Oak Openings in He also turned from pure fiction to the combination of art and controversy in which he achieved notoriety in the novels of the previous decade.
His Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy-- Satanstoe , The Chainbearer , and The Redskins —dramatized issues of land ownership in response to renters in the s opposing the long leases common in the old Dutch settlements in the Hudson Valley. He tried his hand with serialization with The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief , first published in Graham's Magazine in , a satire on contemporary nouveau riche.
In The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak he introduced supernatural machinery to show the decline of an ideal society in the South Seas when demagogues prevail. The Ways of the Hour , his last completed novel, portrayed a mysterious and independent young woman defending herself against criminal charges. Cooper spent the last years of his life back in Cooperstown.
He died on September 14, , the day before his 62nd birthday. Cooper's wife Susan survived her husband only by a few months and was buried by his side at Cooperstown. Several well-known writers, politicians, and other public figures honored Cooper's memory with a memorial in New York, six months after his death, in February Daniel Webster gave a speech to the gathering while Washington Irving served as a co-chairman, along with William Cullen Bryant , who also gave an address which did much to restore Cooper's damaged reputation among American writers of the time.
Cooper's father was a lapsed Quaker; probably influenced by his wife's family, the DeLanceys, Cooper in his fiction often favorably depicted clergy of the Episcopal Church , though Calvinist ministers came in for their share of both admiring and critical treatment. In the s as Cooper increasingly despaired over the United States maintaining the vision and promise of the Constitution, his fiction increasingly turned to religious themes.
In The Wing-And-Wing , , the hero, a French revolutionary free-thinker, loses the Italian girl he loves because he cannot accept her simple Christianity. In contrast, in the The Sea Lions the hero wins his beloved only after a spiritual transformation while marooned in the Antarctic. And the The Oak Openings features a pious Parson Amen who wins the admiration of the Indians who kill him, praying for them during torture.
After establishing permanent residence in Cooperstown, Cooper became active in Christ Episcopal Church, taking on the roles of warden and vestryman. As the vestryman, he donated generously to this church and later supervised and redesigned its interior with oak furnishings at his own expense. He was also energetic as a representative from Cooperstown to various regional conventions of the Episcopal church.
But only several months before his death, in July , was he confirmed in this church by his brother-in-law, the Reverend William H. Cooper was one of the more popular 19th-century American authors, and his work was admired greatly throughout the world. Lawrence believed that Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, and Flaubert were all "so very obvious and coarse, besides the lovely, mature and sensitive art of Fennimore Cooper.
Cooper's work, particularly The Pioneers and The Pilot , demonstrate an early 19th-century American preoccupation with alternating prudence and negligence in a country where property rights were often still in dispute. Cooper was one of the early major American novelists to include African, African-American and Native American characters in his works.
In particular, Native Americans play central roles in his Leatherstocking Tales. However, his treatment of this group is complex and highlights the relationship between frontier settlers and American Indians as exemplified in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish , depicting a captured white girl who marries an Indian chief and has a baby with him, but after several years is eventually returned to her parents.
The Last of the Mohicans includes both the character of Magua, who fearing the extinction of his race at the hands of the whites savagely betrays them, as well as Chingachgook, the last chief of the Mohicans, who is portrayed as Natty Bumppo's noble, courageous, and heroic counterpart. According to Tad Szulc , Cooper was a devotee of Poland's causes uprisings to regain Polish sovereignty.
He organized a club in Paris to support the rebels, and brought flags of the defeated Polish rebel regiment from Warsaw to present them to the exiled leaders in Paris. With his friend the Marquis de La Fayette, he supported liberals during the regime changes in France and elsewhere in the s. Though some scholars have hesitated to classify Cooper as a strict Romantic, Victor Hugo pronounced him the greatest novelist of the century outside France.
Cooper was also criticized heavily in his day for his depiction of women characters in his work. James Russell Lowell , Cooper's contemporary and a critic, referred to it poetically in A Fable for Critics , writing, " Cooper's lasting reputation today rests largely upon the five Leatherstocking Tales. In his study focusing on romantic relationships, both hetero- and homo-sexual, literary scholar Leslie Fiedler opines that with the exception of the five Natty Bumppo-Chingachgook novels, Cooper's "collected works are monumental in their cumulative dullness.
Cooper was honored on a U. Cooper appears briefly as a character in Anya Seton 's historical romance Dragonwyck. Three dining halls at the State University of New York at Oswego are named in Cooper's remembrance Cooper Hall, The Pathfinder, and Littlepage because of his temporary residence in Oswego and for setting some of his works there. Cooper Park in Michigan 's Comstock Township is named after him.
Cooper's novels were very popular in the rest of the world, including, for instance, Russia. In particular, great interest of the Russian public in Cooper's work was primarily incited by the novel The Pathfinder , which the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky declared to be "a Shakespearean drama in the form of a novel". This name became a symbol of exciting adventures among Russian readers.
Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. American writer — Photograph by Mathew Brady , Early life and education [ edit ]. Service in the Navy [ edit ]. Writings [ edit ]. First endeavors [ edit ].
Europe [ edit ]. Back to America [ edit ]. Historical and nautical work [ edit ]. Critical reaction [ edit ]. Later life [ edit ]. Religious activities [ edit ]. Legacy [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Novels [ edit ]. Novelette [ edit ]. Short Stories [ edit ]. Play [ edit ]. Non-Fiction [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ]. Primary sources [ edit ].
Notes [ edit ]. It is largely what led to the War of Knowledge of Cooper's life comes primarily from what he divulged in his published works, notes, and letters of that period. References [ edit ]. My Rye. Journal of the Early Republic. JSTOR Retrieved November 21, Harper and Brothers. The Rye Record.