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[97] some years in Yale College, and a dismissal for insubordination, he spent nearly five years at sea, became a midshipman, and intended to enter the navy for life. In 1811, however, he married, resigned from the navy, and became a man of leisure. His first strictly American novel appeared ten years later, and in the thirty years following he produced more than thirty novels, of which eight or ten are still widely read. Of these the Leather-Stocking tales are of course the most famous.

Like Scott, Cooper was less successful with his heroes and heroines than with his minor characters. The conversation of his civilian worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has said, in his admirable biography of Cooper, “of a kind not known to human society.” His women are particularly uninteresting, though in uniformly describing them as “females” he is simply conforming to the usage of his day. When he says of one heroine that “her very nature is made up of religion and female decorum,” and of another that “on one occasion her little foot moved,” in spite of the fact that “she had been carefully taught too that even this beautiful portion ”

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James Fenimore Cooper (2)
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