When speaking of literary classics in fiction the first names that often come to mind are Shakespeare, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy, or other great foreign writers, but America has its own share of classical literary genius and it is well worth the reading. Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others produced a plethora of works that are entertaining to say the least, and brilliant to say it best.
The first great American writer was Washington Irving. Around the turn of the 19th century he wrote a monumental three-volume biography of George Washington that is a couple thousand pages long. It traces Washington’s lineage back to the 1100s in England and follows almost every footstep he made in his life. It’s an interesting but very detailed work. Irving is better known, however, for his short stories about New England folklore such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.
America’s first great novelist was James Fenimore Cooper. Born to wealth, Cooper lived in a stately mansion on the shores of Lake Otsego in central New York. His father founded the village of Cooperstown, which today is home to the baseball Hall of Fame. Cooper sailed the seas in the Navy and then served as a diplomat in Europe. After writing a well-received history of the U.S. Navy, he complained one day about a poorly written book he was reading and claimed he could do better. His wife laid down the challenge and he took up pen and paper and began to write.
In 1820 he published The Spy. Based on a true story about a man who had spied for George Washington during the revolution, it was an immediate success and Cooper’s literary career was on its way. A year later he produced The Wilderness, in which he introduced the public to an aging frontier scout named Natty Bumppo and his drunken Indian sidekick, Chingachgook, otherwise known as John Mohegan. It was the first in a series of five novels that became known as The Leatherstocking Tales, and earned Cooper his prominent place in American literary history.
Cooper had not planned the five volume series, but The Wilderness was so popular that his readers wanted more and in 1826 he gave them The Last of the Mohicans. This is probably the most well known of all his works, and takes the reader back to the French and Indian War where a younger Natty Bumppo, known then either as Hawkeye, or Le Longue Carabine, fights the Hurons, the French, and renegade Iroquois, along with Chingachgook, who redeems his reputation as a very noble Indian, the last surviving hereditary chief of his tribe. The story is woven around the surrender of the English Fort William Henry to the French in 1756, and the Huron slaughter of the unarmed occupants as they left the fort.
A year later Cooper finished the Leatherstocking’s life at eighty years of age living with Indians in Kansas territory in The Prairie. Thirteen years passed before Cooper decided to fill in the missing parts to the saga and in 1840 he published The Deerslayer, followed in 1841 by The Pathfinder. The Deerslayer takes place during King George’s War in the 1740s where a young Natty, who had been orphaned and raised among the Mohicans, is now about age 20, and has his first adventure with his childhood friend Chingachgook. The Pathfinder then takes place sometime after The Last of the Mohicans during the French and Indian War. In The Pathfinder Natty falls in love for the first time only to be rejected.
Cooper died in 1851 with his legacy as America’s greatest story teller well established and unquestioned, until a satirist from Hannibal, Missouri, full of caustic wit and sarcasm, re-examined his works and found them completely undeserving of the accolades earlier given. Mark Twain did not like Cooper’s efforts.
Cooper wrote in the same style of the contemporary European writers of his day. Dickens, Dumas and Tolstoy were often lengthy, overly descriptive and verbose. Cooper was the same, often boringly long in describing events that were of little significance to the story. For example, in The Deerslayer a young woman named Judith, after the death of her father, finds his old letters to her long dead mother in a trunk, and kneels down to read them. Tears roll down her face as she reads through the night and the candle burns low, and all the while Deerslayer stands silently by out of respect, and Cooper takes nearly a hundred pages to relate the episode. I loved the book when I read it in high school, but it took me several evenings to finish that chapter. I just couldn’t do it without falling asleep.
Mark Twain’s complaints, however, centered on Cooper’s Indians. A nobler race of men was never found than Cooper’s Indians. Apparently neither was a more inept race of men ever found, but it wasn’t just the Indians that upset Twain. Cooper’s creative license had him absolutely livid.
At the beginning of The Deerslayer, a forty-foot barge is being poled upriver into the mouth of the Susquehanna River and onto Lake Otsego, which Cooper calls the “Glimmer Glass.” When Indians appear on the shore, the occupants of the barge retreat into a safe housing enclosure in the middle of the vessel. The barge then continues to move upstream, apparently from momentum, until it reaches the safety of the lake. But before it can get there the Indians climb into the trees and from overhanging branches attempt to leap onto the barge. They all mistime their leaps onto the swift moving unpowered vessel still making progress against the current, however, and land in the water, except for one who hits his head on the roof of the enclosure and knocks himself out.
In The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye dons a bear costume and crawling around on all fours and making bear grunting noises, he sneaks into an Indian village in the middle of the night and performs his pretense so well that he completely fools all the Indians. In The Pathfinder he finds himself trapped at the edge of a cliff and takes a gray blanket that he just conveniently happens to have with him, lays down and covers himself with the blanket and does an impression of a rock so well that the Indians can’t find him. Later in a shooting contest the Pathfinder with his sharp eye is able to tell at one hundred yards that the bullet he just shot hit the exact spot of a bullet previously shot by his opponent. He instructs the judges to dig the bullets out of the post that served as a target and sure enough, they find two bullets just as Pathfinder had said. You can tell why Twain was upset. Cooper tells some great stories, but his liberty with the details is frustrating to no end.
Mark Twain was born in 1835. He claimed to have come on Halley’s comet when it passed by earth that same year, and predicted he would leave when it came back in 1910. He did. If he had lived a hundred years later he might have been pleased to see how often his most famous work, Huckleberry Finn, had been made into movies. He might also have been disappointed to see how often The Last of the Mohicans had been given the same honor.
In 1932 a Saturday matinee serial was made starring a miscast Harry Carey as Hawkeye. He was much too old for the role. A later movie version starred Randolph Scott. In 1972 a made for TV serial version was broadcast on PBS starring Steve Forrest. Later in the decade another TV version was broadcast on network TV. More recently Daniel Day Lewis starred in another movie version. Most of these have taken some poetic license with the details of the original story, but all have been successful proving that Cooper’s original idea, in spite of some of the inconsistencies and verbosity of his details, is a worthwhile story.
When I was in the tenth grade we had to read a segment of The Deerslayer in my English class. I was so enamored with what I read that I asked for the book and my grandmother got it for me for Christmas. A year later I read The Last of the Mohicans. It became at the time my favorite book.
So, when I found on I-books on my I-pad a free copy of The Last of the Mohicans, I downloaded it and decided to relive my youth and reread this story that intrigued me so long ago. As it turns out there is more to Cooper than Mark Twain’s frustrations let on.
The first chapter was just as I remembered; a long descriptive account of the mountains, forests and lakes where the story would take place. Except that, forty years on, it was not quite as boring as it was the first time. In fact, Cooper knew the country well, and his description is factual and accurate, and makes for a very informative geographical study of the state of New York.
There is also an enlightening look into the confusing English-Indian, French-Indian, and Indian-Indian relationships of the time. The Indians are not nearly so inept as in The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder, and except for Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, not nearly as noble. It is a good historical drama and if you can overlook the bear costume and wade through some of the lengthy verbiage, as well as some rather stiff dialogue, there is an exciting story in there.
James Fenimore Cooper had his faults, sure, but he was a pioneer in his field. His craft wasn’t perfected yet, and for that he should be given some allowances. Others, Twain included, would prove to be much more skillful writers of the novel, but Cooper opened the door on the genre in America, and for that he should be remembered as America’s first great novelist.
