James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (review)

James Fenimore Cooper’s status in American literary history is something of an enigma. He wrote a prodigious number of novels, 32 in all, and commanded the attention of the American reading public for the better part of three decades. His novels have been read widely by scholars and the general public alike over the course of the past two centuries, and, in some cases, as with the frontier thesis, he has played a crucial role in narratives of American cultural origins. And yet, Cooper remains something of a marginal figure, playing second fiddle to more celebrated writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Cooper’s reputation has waxed and waned over the years, but he has never been completely dismissed nor wholeheartedly enshrined in the American literary pantheon. It is astonishing, therefore, that Wayne Franklin’s recent biography of Cooper represents the first scholarly account of the life of such a seminal writer. We may argue about the merits of Cooper’s prose, the politics of his representations, and the extent of his influence on American cultural production, but Cooper undoubtedly stands as a major figure in American letters. On this basis alone, Franklin’s meticulous and exhaustive narrative of Cooper’s life is a welcome contribution to scholarly knowledge.

In this first volume of what promises to be a two-volume project, Franklin details Cooper’s life from his childhood through his departure for Europe in 1826. The year 1826 marks a crucial year in Franklin’s account of Cooper, signalling the end of the first phase of his career as a writer and functioning as a significant marker in Franklin’s narrative of American publishing history. Cooper, Franklin argues, is able to leave for Paris in 1826 only because he has formed an agreement with Carey and Lea, “one of the nation’s pioneering publishers,” that allows him some measure of independence (xx). Before then Cooper did not use a formal publisher. Franklin explains the process Cooper employed to publish his first five novels: “He produced his initial books completely at his own risk, employing first one and then a second New York bookseller as his agent. Those men made all the practical arrangements with paper suppliers, printers, binders, and wholesale and retail merchants, but they were not responsible for “editing” the books, reading proofs, or giving Cooper any regular form of advice” (xx). In fact, Franklin’s biography of Cooper is deeply invested in a narrative of the author’s role in the development of American publishing. In this biography Cooper is a literary hero both for his artistic production and for his contributions to the still embryonic publishing scene in the 1820s United States. Much of Franklin’s account of Cooper’s “early years” is thus dedicated to tracing Cooper’s labors and those of his agents in producing Precaution, The Spy, The Pioneers, The Pilot, and Lionel Lincoln. The key transitional text is The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s first book with Carey and Lea.

Book history scholars will find much to admire in Franklin’s fascinating account of Cooper’s efforts to control the publication of these early novels. Franklin persuasively argues that Cooper not only emulated Walter Scott’s novels, he also learned from the way Scott “sought to maintain control over his literary property and thereby milk it for all it was worth” (250). Cooper here emerges as literary impresario as much as author. His successes and failures navigating the publishing process form a central theme of the biography and often take the place of the typical literary biography’s emphasis on the creative process. I am not suggesting that Franklin ignores Cooper’s creative process, but his biography is refreshing in the degree to which it avoids an overemphasis on Cooper’s “genius” in favor of a more matter-of-fact engagement with the mechanics of authorship and writing in the 1820s. Franklin’s Cooper is a businessman who produces novels as one might produce steam engines or...