SOURCE: Bryson, Michael A. “‘The Earth Is the Common Home of All’: Susan Fenimore Cooper's Investigations of a Settled Landscape.” In Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology, pp. 105-33. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002.

In the following essay, Bryson examines Susan Fenimore Cooper's scientific, literary, and environmental approach to her community in Rural Hours.

From within the forests of central New York State in the mid-1800s, a land of expansive woodlands, rolling hills, quiet lakes, and small but growing communities, writer and naturalist Susan Fenimore Cooper published a book entitled Rural Hours (1850), which described the local environment and rural customs of her home village, Cooperstown. Cooper's text, like that of fellow diarist and enthusiastic observer of nature Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), is organized as a daily journal and covers the span of one...