JAMES FENIMIRE COOPER-1

James Fenimore Cooper grew up in Lake Otsego, New York, where his father, Judge William Cooper, author of A Guide in the Wilderness (1810), had founded the frontier village of Cooperstown. James Fenimore Cooper describes his boyhood home, a bit of aristocracy on the fringe of the backwoods, in the first of his “Leather-Stocking Tales,” The Pioneers (1823), and with less sympathy, in Home as Found (1838). James Fenimore Cooper left college without graduating and spent several years aboard merchant ships and with the US Navy. From this came the books The Pilot (1823), and his scholarly and pioneering History of the Navy of the United States pf America (1839).