THE TASK of becoming the principal romancer of the new
nation might have weighed heavily upon Cooper if he had
entered his career as a novelist in any self-conscious way.
Instead, he fell almost accidentally into authorship. Unlike
the bookish Brown, Cooper was trained in the world of action
and adventure. Born at Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the
son of Judge William Cooper and Susan Fenimore, Cooper
was taken when a baby to Cooperstown, the raw central vil-
lage of a pioneer settlement recently established by his father
on Otsego Lake, New York. Here the boy saw at first hand the
varied life of the border, observed its shifts and contrivances,
and learned to feel the mystery of the dark forest which lay
beyond the cleared circle of his own life: a mystery which
must be taken into account in any attempt to understand the
American character in its frontier aspects. Judge Cooper, less
a typical backwoodsman than a kind of warden of the New
York marches, like Judge Templeton in The Pioneers, did not
keep his son in the woods but sent him first to the rector
of St. Peter's in Albany, who grounded him in Latin and
Anglican theology, and then to Yale, where he wore his college
duties so lightly as to be dismissed in his third year. Thinking
the navy might furnish better discipline than Yale, Judge
Cooper shipped his son before the mast on a merchant vessel
to learn the art of seamanship which there was then no naval
academy to teach. On his first voyage the ship was chased
by pirates and stopped by British searching parties, incidents
Cooper never forgot. Commissioned in 1808 as midshipman,
he first served on the Atlantic and later in the same year was

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