About the Author

American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) has been credited with inventing and popularizing a wide variety of genre fiction, including the Western, the spy novel, the high seas adventure tale, and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world.  
 

Reviews

"Wayne Franklin single-handedly restores Cooper to his rightful place in American literature. . . . A towering achievement."—H. Daniel Peck, author of Thoreau's Morning Work         
*H. Daniel Peck*

“No one has ever written a biography of Cooper that answers as many questions, raises as many important historical issues, or provides as much detail of the life of Cooper and his family or of much of New York history in the late eighteenth century or the first half of the nineteenth century. The publication of Franklin’s biography is a major event.”—Jeffrey Walker, Oklahoma State University 
*Jeffrey Walker*

"A remarkable feat of scholarship and literary imagining. . . . Franklin's book is meticulously researched and wonderfully comprehensive. A biography of this subtlety of depth has been well worth waiting for."—Hugh Egan, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
*Register of the Kentucky Historical Society*

"The biography is an engaging, well written account of an important time, place, and career in American literary history. It surprises, informs, and challenges the reader, and should be on the reading list of any early or nineteenth-century Americanist."—Rocky Mountain Review
*Rocky Mountain Review*