Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers
General
Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers
American literature
In 1822, after “The Spy” had made Cooper famous, he removed to New
York, where he lived for a period of four years, one of the most
popular men in the metropolis. His force of character, big-heartedness,
and genial, companionable nature――notwithstanding the fact that he was
contentious and frequently got into the most heated discussions――made
him unusually popular with those who knew him. He had many friends,
and his friends were the best citizens of New York. He founded the
“Bread and Cheese Lunch,” to which belonged Chancellor Kent, the
poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Wm. Cullen Bryant, Samuel Morse, the
inventor of the telegraph, and many other representatives of science,
literature, and the learned professions. In 1826 he sailed for Europe,
in various parts of which he resided for a period of six years. Before
his departure he was tendered a dinner in New York, which was attended
by many of the most prominent men of the nation. Washington Irving
had gone to the Old World eleven years before and traveled throughout
Great Britain and over the Continent, but Cooper’s works, though
it was but six years since his first volume was published, were at
this time more widely known than those of Irving; and with the author
of the “Sketchbook” he divided the honors which the Old World so
generously showered upon those two brilliant representatives of the
New.
Many pleasant pages might be filled with the records of Cooper’s six
years in Europe, during which time he enjoyed the association and
respect of the greatest literary personages of the Old World. It
would be interesting to tell how Sir Walter Scott sought him out in
Paris and renewed the acquaintance again in London; how he lived in
friendship and intimacy with General Lafayette at the French capital;
to tell of his associations with Wordsworth and Rogers in London; his
intimate friendship with the great Italian Greenough, and his fondness
for Italy, which country he preferred above all others outside of
America; of the delightful little villa where he lived in Florence,
where he said he could look out upon green leaves and write to the
music of the birds; to picture him settled for a summer in Naples;
living in Tasso’s villa at Sarento, writing his stories in the
same house in which the great Latin author had lived, with the same
glorious view of the sea and the bay, and the surf dashing almost
against its walls. But space forbids that we should indulge in
recounting these pleasant reminiscences. Let it be said that wherever
he was he was thoroughly and pronouncedly an American. He was much
annoyed by the ignorance and prejudice of the English in all that
related to his country. In France he vigorously defended the system
of American government in a public pamphlet which he issued in favor
of General Lafayette, upon whom the public press was making an attack.
He was equally in earnest in bringing forward the claims of our poets,
and was accustomed at literary meetings and dinner parties to carry
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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