America takes special pride in Washington Irving, because he was the first
author to invest her brief history with the enduring fascination of
romance. We shall the better appreciate our debt to him, if we imagine that
some wizard has the power to subtract from our literature the inimitable
Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, and our national romantic
river, the storied Hudson.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1789-1851
[Illustration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER]
YOUTH.--Cooper's place in American literature is chiefly based on his
romantic stories of the pioneer and the Indian. We have seen how Captain
John Smith won the ear of the world by his early story of Indian adventure,
how Charles Brockden Brown in _Edgar Huntly_ deliberately selected the
Indian and the life of the wilderness as good material for an American
writer of romance. Cooper chose these very materials and used them with a
success attained by no other writer. Let us see how his early life fitted
him to write of the Indian, the pioneer, the forest, and the sea.
He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the year made memorable by
the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family
moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of
Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet
for the lake.
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