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James Fenimore Cooper

COOPER was born in New Jersey in 1789, but when only about a year old removed to his father's almost feudal domain at Cooperstown, New York, where he died in 1851. There he learned to know the wilderness which plays so important a part in his books, and there, too, he probably acquired that headstrong self-assertiveness and disregard of the opinions of others which made him, while one of the few most widely read authors in the world, one of the most cordially detested individuals to be found. He had a positive genius for getting in bad. While Dickens and Kipling deeply wounded one nation by their American Notes, they were pigmies in this respect compared with Cooper. He could exasperate anybody and everybody and apparently cultivated with pleasure his habitual aptitudes. Lowell wrote of him as "Cooper, who's written six volumes to prove he's as good as a lord." An English magazine described him as a "bilious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," an "insect," a "grub," and a "reptile." The "New-Yorker" pleasantly wrote of him: "He is as proud of blackguarding as a fishwoman is of Billingsgate. It is as natural to him as snarling to a tom-cat or growling to a bulldog. He has the scorn and contempt of every well-informed American." He cultivated a rich crop of libel suits--and won them all!

Yet the kindly hand of time has made us forget all this virulence. It is only the virile story-teller who is remembered. Often called "The American Scott," he has probably been as widely read in all languages as any man who ever put pen to paper.