Richard Gray
How To Write A Hero
James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years
By Wayne Franklin
Yale University Press 679pp £25 order from our bookshop
If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, it was James Fenimore Cooper. But he was far more than that. He was the founding father of the American historical novel; he helped develop and popularise such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political satire, and the dynastic novel. He reflected, in all his fiction, on themes and issues of vital concern to the new republic: the destruction of the wilderness and the American Indian in the name of ‘settlement’, the competing priorities of freedom and social order, and the potential conflict between the creed of self-reliance and the need for a communal ethic. ‘Cooper set the terms of American dreaming,’ as Wayne Franklin puts it in this first volume of a major new biography. Moreover, as Cooper struggled to see his books into print at a time when the publishing industry was in its infancy, he helped establish the material as well as the imaginative foundations of American writing – not just the modes in which American books might be written, but also the means by which they could be produced, distributed and read. In short, he stands at the beginning of American literature as both a great tradition and a marketable commodity.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad