SOURCE: "Cooper: The First Phase," in The World of Washington Irving, E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1944, pp. 167-82.

In the following essay, Brooks discusses the influence of the sea on Cooper's early fiction.

While Irving was exploring England, another New Yorker, six years younger, who had served for a while in the navy after going to Yale, had married and settled in Westchester county, where he lived as a country gentleman without so much as a thought of writing a book. In 1819, James Fenimore Cooper was thirty years old, and he was looking forward to a farmer's life, planting trees at Angevine, the house he had built at Scarsdale, grading his lawns, building fences, grouping the shrubs and draining the swamps.

Cooper had inherited from the founder of Cooperstown, his father, a sufficiently ample fortune and twenty-three farms, and his wife was one of the De Lanceys, the...