The Leather-Stocking Tales have served for many as a first introduction to the mythological realm of the pathless American wilderness, what Hemingway essentially meant by his "great, good place": a realm of terror, where silent Indians lurked in the depths of the gloomy forest; of delight, where a stately buck stooped to drink at the margin of an enchanted, unspoiled lake; and above all of freedom, where a man, as the saying has it, could be a man, could indeed be a hero. Yet not even Natty's commanding presence should overshadow the whole of Cooper's achievement, which was scattered throughout his novels— his romances of forest and sea, his tales of colonial and revolutionary history, his novels of politics and society. In the pages of all these works Cooper helped his young nation, still struggling to attain its intellectual independence from the Old World, to discover and take possession of itself.
Cooper was born in 1789, the same year Washington became the first president of the newborn republic. At his birth he was simply called James Cooper; the name Fenimore, his mother's maiden name, he took for himself when he was thirty-seven. Also from his mother he acquired the fondness for reading contemporary fiction that led toward his eventual choice of a literary career.
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