United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He is unquestionably one of America's great novelists and one of the world's great romancers. There is abundant reason, therefore, why Americans of the present day should know James Fenimore Cooper. He has many a good story of the wilderness and the sea to tell to those who enjoy tales of adventure.
Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper's early married life. In the author's pages on England, published in 1837, was expressed a wish to write a story on "the teeming and glorious naval history of that land."
What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made its appearance at that date.
Prentiss Ingraham would hand you an exciting jolt on the very first page, and sometimes in the very first paragraph. You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas, but his Indians were so everlastingly slow about getting under way with their scalping operations!
"And what will that answer be?" "It is for you to tell me," said Boyce. "In order to undertake such a terrible responsibility," said I, "I must know the whole truth concerning Althea Fenimore." "I've come here to tell it to you," said he. It was to a priest rather than to a man that he made full confession of his grievous sin.
One of Fenimore Cooper's Indians notably Chingachgook, if, which seemed incredible, that was really the man's name would have crept up without a sound and heard what was being said and got in on the ground floor of whatever plot was being hatched. But experience had taught Mr Pickering that, superior as he was to Chingachgook and his friends in many ways, as a creeper he was not in their class.
"The Talisman" of Scott, "The Spy" of Fenimore Cooper, and many another early nineteenth-century romance, began with a solitary horseman whom the reader was forced to follow for several pages before anything whatever happened. Latterly, however, novelists have learned from writers of short-stories the art of opening emphatically with material important to the plot.
"I only returned in time to see our Fenimore Cooper friend retreating through the window," he replied; "but no doubt you had a good look at him?" "I had!" I answered eagerly. "It was Samarkan!" "I thought so! I have suspected as much for a long time." "Was this the object of our visit here?" "It was one of the objects," admitted Nayland Smith evasively.
"Beecher!" exclaimed Tom, and there was such a change in his manner that his friends could not help noticing it. He jumped to his feet, his eyes snapping, and he looked eagerly and anxiously at Professor Bumper. "Did you say his name was Fenimore Beecher?" Tom asked in a tense voice. "That's what it is Professor Fenimore Beecher.
And they are now remembered in the names of the principal lakes and streams of the country that once was theirs. The boy was face-to-face with the "grim warriors, braves, and chieftains that the man, Fenimore Cooper, translated into his pages, with a touch true to the red man's life," his instinct in trading, his friendly and hostile intent. Here Nature was his first and unforgettable teacher.
Word Of The Day