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 James Fenimore Cooper was born September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, to William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper. In 1790 the family moved to the frontier country of upstate New York, where William had established a village he called Cooperstown.
Although cushioned by wealth and William’s position as a judge, the Coopers found pioneer life to be rugged, and only seven of the thirteen Cooper children survived their early years.
Profoundly affected by the challenges of frontier living, James would repeatedly draw on his childhood experience in The Pioneers and many of his other novels. Cooper was educated by private tutors at Yale, where he enrolled in 1803; he was expelled in 1805 after setting off an explosion that blew off another student’s dormitory door.
As a midshipman in the U.S. Navy, he served at an isolated post on Lake Ontario and in a relatively leisurely assignment in New York City, where he met his future wife, Susan Augusta DeLancey, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1811 he resigned his commission to marry her.
According to family lore, Cooper fell into writing on a dare: One evening he threw down a novel in disgust, saying he could write a better book himself; when Susan challenged him and reminded him that he could barely stand to write a letter, Cooper wrote his first novel, Precaution, published in 1820.
Encouraged by favorable reviews, Cooper wrote other books in quick succession and was soon regarded as a major voice in America’s emerging literary tradition. He eventually published thirty-two novels and was the first American to make a living as a professional novelist.
Cooper and his family lived in Europe for seven years but returned to America in 1833. Eventually settling in Cooperstown, Cooper remained on the American literary scene as a prolific writer of political tracts, naval histories, and works of fiction. He died in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851. [edit]
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