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Yes today, 15th September,is the birthday of the first best-selling American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, born in Burlington, New Jersey (1789). For most of
his life he was known as James Cooper, but after his father's death, he
tried to have his name legally changed to Fenimore, so as to inherit
some property from his mother's family. He didn't get the property, but
the name stuck.
He started out as a Navy man, but after he got married, his wife
persuaded him to quit the sea and stay home. He struggled to run the
estate he had inherited from his father, and he got into terrible debt.
One day, he was reading aloud to his wife from an English novel, and he
said he thought he could write a better novel himself. His wife laughed
at him, because he didn't even enjoy writing letters much, but he sat
down and wrote a book and it was published as Precaution
(1820). He wrote six novels in the next six years.
He became best known for his series of five novels called the Leatherstocking Tales, including The Last of the Mohicans
(1826), about frontier violence and adventure. At the time, most
Americans read English literature about kings and queens, because they
thought it was more romantic than their own difficult, colonial lives.
James Fenimore Cooper was the first American author to make the wild,
untamed life in America seem romantic.
During
his life, he was widely respected as a great novelist, but after his
death, Mark Twain wrote an essay called "Fenimore Cooper's Literary
Offences" (1895) that helped to destroy his reputation. Twain
wrote:"[The rules of literature] require that the personages in a tale
shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the
reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this
detail has often been overlooked in [Cooper's books]." But Fenimore
Cooper is still remembered for
making America a subject for adventure and romance.
You may obtain an Ebook Edition of the "The Last of the Mohicans" by going to
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