| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. By Wayne Franklin. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xxxvi, 708 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-10805-7.)
Much as Washington Irving constructed a lost world out of his boyhood rambles in the Hudson Valley, James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) filled his imagination with youthful memories of Otsego County in upstate New York. Even his legendary hunter, Natty Bumppo of the Leatherstocking novels, was drawn from real life. "In some complex refashioning of American possibility," writes Wayne Franklin, "Cooper himself could become Natty" (p. 13).	1
Franklin's biography of the novelist is comprehensive and authoritative. It takes the New Yorker from birth through 1826, the year The Last of the Mohicans was published. Cooper received a proper education in Albany, but he was unable to apply to Princeton University, because his older brother had been expelled from there for antics that apparently included arson. At the tender age of thirteen, he attended Yale College, where his circle of friends included the future scientist Benjamin Silliman, to whom he later joked: "I often boast that you and I were the first two chemists of Yale; you as the dealer in experiments, and I as your bottle-washer" (p. 50). Franklin supposes that Silliman, the son of a Connecticut militia general in the Revolution, may also have filled his head with stories of battles and of his own father's kidnapping—the general's Loyalist kidnapper being the uncle of the future Mrs. James Fenimore Cooper.	. . .

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