_John Neal._--Born in Portland, Maine, and beginning life as a shop-boy in Boston, John Neal (1793-1876) became in turn a wholesale dry-goods merchant, a lawyer, and a voluminous critic, poet, and novelist. He boasted that in thirty-six years he had written enough altogether to fill a hundred octavo volumes; yet to-day he is little more than a name. His first novel, “Keep Cool,” which he afterward spoke of with justice as a “paltry, contemptible affair,” appeared in 1817. His best novels are “Seventy-Six” (1823), a lively story of the Revolution, “Rachel Dyer” (1828), a story of the Salem Witchcraft, and “The Down-Easters” (1833), an extravagant tale which deals with the ways of steamboat passengers, and into which he manages to introduce plenty of horrors. Neal has been well styled “the universal Yankee, whittling his way through creation, with a half-genius for everything, a robust genius for nothing.” He is said to have been the originator of the woman’s suffrage movement, the first person to establish a gymnasium in America, and the first to encourage Edgar A. Poe.[6] _James Fenimore Cooper._--The first American to win universal recognition as a powerful novelist was James Fenimore Cooper. Born at Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, of English Quaker and Swedish parentage, he was taken, when a year old, to the Central New York wilderness, where his father, having become the owner of large tracts of land, had laid out the village of Cooperstown. Here, on the shores of the beautiful Otsego Lake, in a motley frontier settlement, the boy Cooper passed his earliest years. In due time entering the family of an Albany clergyman as a private pupil, Cooper proceeded in 1803 to Yale College, where he became a member of the class of 1806. An escapade in his third year led to his dismissal; after which he served a marine apprenticeship of a year and then entered the navy, serving as midshipman for nearly four years. In 1811, he married Susan A. De Lancey, a lady of Huguenot and Tory family, and a sister of Bishop De Lancey of Western New York; and at her request resigned his commission, to become an amateur farmer, successively at Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, at Cooperstown, and at Scarsdale, Westchester County, all in New York State. Thus he arrived at the age of thirty without having even dreamed of a career of authorship. One day, reading a novel descriptive of English society, he impatiently threw down the book and exclaimed that he could write a better story himself. Challenged by his wife to do so, he wrote and published “Precaution” (1820), a dull and conventional story of English social life, purporting to be the work of an Englishman. Although the novel was not very successful, his friends urged Cooper to try again, and this time to write of scenes of which he had some personal knowledge. The publication of “The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground,” in December, 1821, marks the beginning of a long series of successes.