James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years by Wayne Franklin (review)

At long last, James Fenimore Cooper has a biography commensurate with his achievement as America's preeminent—and most contentious—antebellum author. Ten years after the appearance of James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), Wayne Franklin has now completed his magisterial study of Cooper as novelist, historian, international traveler and observer, public intellectual, businessman, and center of his family. Using extensive Cooper family archives not available to previous scholars—as well as exhaustive research into primary documents recovered from legal repositories and the journals of his many friends and acquaintances—Franklin provides a rounded and nuanced large-scale portrait of his subject.

Cooper did not make Franklin's task easy. Cooper himself likely burned many papers before leaving for Europe in 1826; the only early holograph to survive is for his first novel, Precaution (1820). From The Prairie (1827) on, both holograph and amanuensis copies exist in whole or in part for many titles. Franklin is the first to explain why: a change in British copyright law in the 1840s required his London publisher, Richard Bentley, to have manuscript copy in his possession even though he set type from sheets Cooper had proofed in America before shipping to London (651, n.6). (Thus many of Bentley's Cooper holographs are extant. A complete list of Cooper's known manuscripts is available at the website of "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper," www.wjfc.org.)

To make the work of future biographers even more difficult, embittered in old age by his perceived failure to make America live up to his ideals of democracy, Cooper forbade the use of family papers for any biography, a prohibition his son Paul honored when daughter Susan proposed one. Susan furthermore began the family practice of giving away his papers and manuscripts, often at random. Thus the first biography of him, by Thomas Lounsbury (1882), in the absence of evidence of his affectionate correspondence with family and friends, presented him as the cold and litigious character perpetrated by the Whig press. Grandson of the novelist and his namesake, a second James Fenimore Cooper published two volumes of his grandfather's correspondence in 1922, presenting sometimes incomplete transcriptions of the author's letters but including some correspondence to him. Robert Spiller's 1931 Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times began the recuperation of Cooper's image as a spirited patriotic polemicist, and James Franklin Beard's The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (1960-68) finally presented well-edited and annotated transcriptions of the bulk of Cooper's letters to others.

Great-great grandson Paul Fenimore Cooper undertook a careful inventory of the remaining family archives, making computerized inventories and microfilming business papers; after his death in 1988 the papers of the novelist went to the American Antiquarian Society, which to assist Beard's initiating "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper" (or the "Cooper Edition"; referred to as CE hereafter) in the 1980s had begun to amass a large collection of the author's printed and manuscript artifacts.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years picks up Cooper's life in 1826 when he and his family began what proved to be a seven-year sojourn in Europe, primarily in France with extended stays in Italy. Franklin thus crafts marvelously compacted scholarship into the 805 pages, which cover the larger portion of Cooper's life and his publications; half of Cooper's thirty-two novels were published in the 1840s. Over two hundred pages of dense notes expand on Franklin's major points, and reference many of the contacts, engagements, and imbroglios that arose in this period. These notes also provide our first complete look at the author's complex and ever- changing business arrangements, with details from Henry S. F. Cooper's microfilmed business papers documenting fully for all his publications his negotiations with publishers and the amounts associated with his expenses and profits. Especially important are the increasingly complicated arrangements he made after abandoning in 1844...