February 6, 2026: Fenimore Cooper Studying: Complementary Nonfiction

[200 years ago Wednesday, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published. That’s one of many Cooper novels with a lot to tell us about his and our America, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Cooper novels. Leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite CooperStudying book!]

Three ways to put Cooper’s nonfiction in conversation with his novels (in addition to the Gleanings series that I discussed yesterday):

1. Nautical Nonfiction: In the seven years between 1839 and 1846, Cooper published six books focused on various aspects of the history of the U.S. navy (the first such book was literally entitled The History of the Navy of the United States of America, while the rest were stories of particular figures and events). Those volumes are an indispensable resource for folks studying or interested in Early Republic naval histories, but they’re also a fascinating complement to Cooper’s nautical novels. For example, Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast (1843), Cooper’s biography of a former shipmate, reads very much like one of his adventure novels—and since his first such nautical novel, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823), was as I wrote in Tuesday’s post the fictionalized story of actual naval hero John Paul Jones, the line between these genres was always a blurry one.
2. National Nonfiction: As I mentioned yesterday, even—if not especially—while he and his family were living in Europe, Cooper’s writing remained focused on his American homeland. That was true not only in his fiction, but also in his first published nonfiction works: Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828), which defends the country against European stereotypes; and Letter to General Lafayette (1830), which extends those arguments (and also addresses some European scandals) in conversation with the famous French ally. And yet the year after Cooper returned to the U.S., he published the fascinating autobiographical work A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), which defends his own life and career choices and in the process offers a much more critical lens on America in ways that foreshadow his later social satire Home as Found (1838) as well as another nonfiction work published in the same year, The American Democrat (1838).
3. New York Nonfiction: While all these nonfiction works thus featured the kinds of stories that Cooper was consistently interested in, there’s no doubt that his most foundational story—to foreshadow the subject of my weekend post—was that of the New York hometown that bore his (or rather his father’s) name. And so it’s no surprise that he returned to those New York stories not only in later fiction like Home is Found, but also in a pair of complementary nonfiction works: The Chronicles of Cooperstown (1838); and the book he was working on when he passed away in 1851, New York; or, the Towns of Manhattan. If the story that every creative writer tells is ultimately his own story—a psychological criticism angle that honors the central voice in my own story on whom I’ll focus this weekend—then no American author illustrates that concept better than James Fenimore Cooper.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?