February 2, 2026: Fenimore Cooper Studying: Precaution & The Spy

[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!]

On three different anxieties of influence that together help explain Cooper’s starting points as a novelist.

1. Susan: According at least to Cooper’s own version of his origin story, he decided to write his first novel when, after declaring that the English novel he was reading aloud to his wife Susan was dull, she challenged him to produce a better book. It’s thus no surprise that the debut novel that resulted, Precaution (1820), was quite imitative of contemporary English writers like Jane Austen and Amelia Opie (and indeed Cooper’s book was initially published anonymously and attributed to a woman!). More exactly, I have to imagine that Cooper’s first goal in writing this book was to satisfy the intimate audience who had requested it—and thus that he crafted a work which aligned with her own interests and preferences (and, per that reading aloud moment, perhaps with his as well).
2. England: I’d say it’s also quite telling that it was both an English book that prompted the challenge and English authors that Cooper subsequently imitated. Like many early 19^th century American creative writers—most famously Washington Irving, but not at all limited to him—Cooper was fascinated with England and Europe, and would indeed move his young family there just six years after publishing Precaution. As I’ll discuss in a later post in this series, they didn’t stay permanently, and even during that European sojourn Cooper remained committed to helping produce a distinctly American body of literature. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously complained in his essay “Nature,” many Early Republic Americans continued to look toward England for inspirations for their evolving new nation, and we can see that trend in Cooper’s literary origins as well.
3. Dad: Or at least some of those origins—because just a year after Precaution, Cooper published his very different second novel, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). The Spy was the first of many historical novels set in and around the American Revolution that Cooper would produce across his career, and so it’s easy and not wrong to contextualize it within the period’s evolving Revolutionary memory. But to my mind, this part of Cooper’s literary origins has to also and especially be linked to another intimate influence, one more foundational (and more fraught) than his wife: his father, William Cooper. William is a main subject of the scholarly book with which I’ll conclude this series, so I’ll just note here that he was literally and figuratively a Founding Father, and so it’s quite striking and telling that Cooper’s first American-set novel was about that generation, and even features in an important role none other than a disguised George Washington!

Next CooperStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?