James Fenimore Cooper eBooks
James Fenimore Cooper was an American writer known for his novels about the American frontier. Born in 1851 in New Jersey, his family founded Cooperstown when the author was a child. After being expelled from Yale, he became a merchant sailor and served in the Navy.
Cooper’s writing career began when his wife bet him that he could write a better book than the one she had been reading. The wager resulted in his first novel, 1820’s Precaution, which he published anonymously. He followed this with the Leatherstocking series, starting with The Pioneers, published in 1823.
In 1826, Cooper published his most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans. The second Leatherstocking book, it was a popular story about the American frontier and American Indians. He followed it the next year with The Prarie, another Leatherstocking novel. The series would be completed with 1840’s The Pathfinder and 1841’s The Deerslayer.
Throughout the 1830s, Cooper’s writing took on a political slant. He wrote a series of letters for a French journal in defense of the United States. He also published similar content in 1833 as A Letter to My Countrymen.
Cooper’s writing also included accounts of his time in the Navy, and about returning to the United States after briefly living in Europe. These histories and autobiographical novels had a mixed reception, though Cooper was a popular novelist throughout his life. Cooper returned to writing novels during the 1840s. His final novel, The Ways of the Hour, was published in 1850. On his death at 1851, he was working on a history of Manhattan.
