| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| susquesus |
Posted - September 07 2003 : 12:39:12 AM
Of the non-Leatherstocking Cooper novels that feature Native American characters prominently, which is your favorite? |
| 3 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| hmacdougall |
Posted - September 29 2003 : 8:40:00 PM
I quite agree that The Spy is a good book -- I had not considered it here because it (like many other Cooper novels) is not about the frontier or Native Americans. New York Historian Carol Kammen, in an article on "The Value of Historical Fiction" in the latest issue of History News, writes that "Cooper's The Spy (1821) is considered the first American example of historical fiction. In it, he explored the motives and events in Westchester County, New York, during the Revolutionary War. That everyone has not read and enjoyed this story, which holds up very well indeed after almost two hundred years, is something of a surprise." |
| CT•Ranger |
Posted - September 29 2003 : 7:01:29 PM
The only non-leatherstocking tales novel I've read is The Spy. So I'd have to vote for it. It's one of Cooper's earlist (1821) and deals with Westchester New York during the American Revolution. It was a kind of no-man's land between the British in New York City and the Continental forces. Some parts of the novel remind me of Joseph Plumb Martin's memoir when his light infantry detachment was sent to hunt Cowboys and Refugees. It was a very interesting part of the war.
"Revolution and Literature:
Cooper's The Spy Revisited
by Brett F. Woods
"We have to live without sympathy, don't we. That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really. I mean…one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold."
John Le Carré wrote this passage in his 1963 espionage classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But, while immensely popular, Le Carré's sentiments were arguably nothing new. James Fenimore Cooper explored similar emotions some 140 years earlier with his 1821 Revolutionary War narrative The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground - the first recognized espionage novel.
In Le Carré's story, the spy is Alec Leamas, who is executed in Cold War Berlin; in Cooper's, it is Harvey Birch, an American spy cast against the backdrop of the revolution in New York State. Both stories, in concert with their times, parallel reality and wed tales of adventure with the dark world of espionage. The moods are gray, the settings circumscribed, and Leamas and Birch emerge as ordinary individuals who are not much different than the people they oppose. They are common men following dangerous paths through uncertain times.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was America's first successful novelist. The son of the prominent federalist William Cooper, founder of the Cooperstown, New York settlement, he was born to privilege, attending boarding school in Albany, and then Yale College, where he was perfunctorily expelled for inappropriate behavior. In 1806 he was commissioned in the United States Navy where he sailed twice to England and served at a frontier outpost on Lake Ontario before being assigned to recruitment duties in New York City. After his father's death in an 1809 duel, the family inherited an unmanageable debt and Cooper, at age thirty, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He resigned his naval commission and married into a wealthy Westchester family that had remained loyalist during the revolution.
Cooper is principally known for his "Leather Stocking" novels of Indian life and frontier adventure - The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), among others - and his principal contribution to espionage fiction rests with The Spy which, to Cooper, seemed a particularly promising theme. While the stories of Nathan Hale, Benedict Arnold and John Andre, held sway in histories of the revolution, the premise of espionage had not yet been examined in fiction. Cooper sought to exploit this situation by, for the first time, casting a spy as the protagonist of a novel.
The Spy was a major literary gamble. Prior to Cooper, writers, philosophers, the military, and people in general, although they certainly knew otherwise, simply chose not to admit that spies existed or that they were in any way beneficial to the aims of "great nations." In their minds, the spy and his activities were dangerous, morally tarnished, and prone to scandal, illegality, or both. As a result, until publication of The Spy, espionage remained a political nether region and an unsavory arena in which to develop heroes, fictional or otherwise. Thieves, yes; murderers, certainly; but spies, be they heroes or villains, were considered well outside the political constraints of civilized society and its literature.
As the first novelist to explore the theme of espionage, Cooper had no examples and instead relied on the conventions of ot |
| susquesus |
Posted - September 07 2003 : 12:48:52 AM
I haven't got to Wyandotte yet but thus far I'm leaning toward "The Oak Openings". "Buzzing Ben Boden" lived the kind of life I would love. As a bee-hunter he sets up shop in the wilds of Michigan and lives alone for months on end gathering his honey, taking it easy, living life at his own pace. Also "Whiskey Center" is a great alcoholic character, give him a few days off the sauce and he's almost a real human being again. In addition Peter, the Tribeless' transformation is wonderfully heart-wrenching to observe. |
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