Throughout much of the nineteenth century James Fenimore Cooper was one of the most widely read novelists in the world and one of the most highly acclaimed. During his lifetime a series of well-publicized quarrels with his country caused his prestige to suffer, but at his death in 1851 he maintained his place as the foremost American novelist. Throughout much of the twentieth century a handful of his novels were still widely read, though mainly by adolescents. Today he is known chiefly by his reputation as a novelist rather than by his novels. The thirty-two novels he wrote, however, at least the majority of them, are considerably better than they are reputed to be. That he will ever again enjoy a vogue is inconceivable; his aesthetic assumptions, his prose style, and the conventions of character and narrative to which he subscribed are too irretrievably outdated. Cooper, in fact, is one of the few great nineteenth-century American authors who never seems "modern," as do such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.
