Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook. THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL (ON AMERICAN THEMES) BEFORE 1860 THE EARLY NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1821–1831) BY ERNEST ERWIN LEISY A.B., University of Kansas, 1913 A.M., University of Chicago, 1919 AN ABSTRACT OF A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 1923 URBANA, ILLINOIS [Illustration] THE EARLY NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1821–1831) James Fenimore Cooper--so the popular legend runs--was a man who wrote stories about idealized Indians and the wilderness, now read mainly by boys; who created Leatherstocking, the man without a cross; and who spent an irascible old age winning petty lawsuits. Further reflection may call to mind that he was enamored of the sea as well as of the wilderness, and that one of his stories had something to do with a spy. All this, of course, is true; but that Cooper did much more than this, has been discovered comparatively recently. The explanation is to be found, in part, in the fact that after Cooper’s death in 1851, the vogue of his type of romance having passed also, his popularity suffered a decline reaching its lowest ebb between 1870 and 1880. Another reason is that the novelist’s dying injunction that no biography be authorized was carried out so literally by his oldest daughter and literary executrix that many family papers of value were destroyed. She afterwards published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for 1887 two reminiscent articles about her father, but these are rambling and uninformative in character. In 1883--thirty years after the death of the novelist--Professor Lounsbury succeeded surprisingly well in piecing together the outward facts of Cooper’s life.[1] The “Correspondence of Cooper,” just published,[2] reveals little about the workmanship or about the personality of the novelist, except by way of emphasizing the fact that his social and political ideas meant more to him than his art. Cooper’s own introductions, added to his works in 1849, the articles by his daughter, and the results of Lounsbury must suffice for the external evidence on Cooper’s work; whatever conclusions are reached on internal evidence may be modified when materials still in the possession of the Cooper family are given up to the public.