[2] After a stint on a commercial voyage, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a midshipman, where he learned the technology of managing sailing vessels which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings.

[4] Throughout his career, he published numerous social, political, and historical works of fiction and non-fiction with the objective of countering European prejudices and nurturing an original American art and culture.

Shortly after James' first birthday, his family moved to Cooperstown, New York, a community founded by his father on a large piece of land which he had bought for development.

Croghan mortgaged the land before the Revolution and after the war part of the tract was sold at public auction to William Cooper and his business partner Andrew Craig.

[6] Cooper was enrolled at Yale University at age 13, but he incited a dangerous prank which involved blowing up another student's door—after having already locked a donkey in a recitation room.

Their stay in Spain lasted several weeks and impressed the young sailor, the accounts of which Cooper later referred to in his Mercedes of Castile, a novel about Columbus.

[18] Cooper's first naval assignment came on March 21, 1808, aboard the USS Vesuvius, an 82-foot bomb ketch that carried twelve guns and a thirteen-inch mortar.

[23][24] Assigned to humdrum recruiting tasks rather than exciting voyages, Cooper resigned his commission from the navy in spring 1810; in the same time period he met, wooed, and became engaged to Susan Augusta de Lancey, whom he married on January 1, 1811.

[28] He organized the influential Bread and Cheese Club that brought together American writers, editors, artists, scholars, educators, art patrons, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and others.

[30][31] In 1826, Cooper moved his family to Europe,[32] where he sought to gain more income from his books, provide better education for his children, improve his health, and observe European manners and politics firsthand.

His books published in Paris include The Prairie, the third Leather-Stocking Tale in which Natty Bumppo dies in the western land newly acquired by Jefferson as the Louisiana Purchase.

He became friends with painter (and later inventor) Samuel Morse and with French general and American Revolutionary War hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

[33][7] Cooper admired the patrician liberalism of Lafayette, who sought to recruit him to his causes, and eulogized him as a man who "dedicated youth, person, and fortune, to the principles of liberty.

[39]Influenced by the ideals of classical republicanism, Cooper feared that the orgy of speculation he witnessed was destructive of civic virtue and warned Americans that it was a "mistake to suppose commerce favorable to liberty"; doing so would lead to a new "moneyed aristocracy".

Drawing upon philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burlamaqui, and Montesquieu, Cooper's political ideas were both democratic, deriving from the consent of the governed, and liberal, concerned with the rights of the individual.

He publicly announced his intentions to author such a historical work while abroad before departing for Europe in May 1826, during a parting speech at a dinner given in his honor: Encouraged by your kindness ...

[43] In 1844, Cooper's Proceedings of the naval court martial in the case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a commander in the navy of the United States, &c. was first published in Graham's Magazine of 1843–44.

It was a review of the court martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie who had hanged three crew members of the brig USS Somers for mutiny while at sea.

"[44] Others, however, assert that Cooper recognized the need for absolute discipline in a warship at sea, and felt sympathetic to Mackenzie over his pending court martial.

[52] Cooper's writings of the 1830s related to current politics and social issues, coupled with his perceived self-promotion, increased the ill feeling between the author and some of the public.

As noted above, on May 10, 1839, he published his History of the U.S. Navy;[43] his return to the Leatherstocking Tales series with The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) brought him renewed favorable reviews.

Faced with competition from younger writers and magazine serialization, and lower prices for books resulting from new technologies, Cooper simply wrote more in his last decade than in either of the previous two.

His Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy--Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846)—dramatized issues of land ownership in response to renters in the 1840s opposing the long leases common in the old Dutch settlements in the Hudson Valley.

[citation needed] After establishing permanent residence in Cooperstown, Cooper became active in Christ Episcopal Church, taking on the roles of warden and vestryman.

[62] D.H. Lawrence believed that Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, and Flaubert were all "so very obvious and coarse, besides the lovely, mature and sensitive art of Fennimore Cooper."

"[63] Cooper's work, particularly The Pioneers and The Pilot, demonstrate an early 19th-century American preoccupation with alternating prudence and negligence in a country where property rights were often still in dispute.

[68] Mark Twain, the ultimate Realist, criticized the Romantic plots and overwrought language of The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder in his satirical but shrewdly observant essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895).

In his 1960 study focusing on romantic relationships, both hetero- and homo-sexual, literary scholar Leslie Fiedler opines that with the exception of the five Natty Bumppo-Chingachgook novels, Cooper's "collected works are monumental in their cumulative dullness.

"[71] More recent criticism views all thirty-two novels in the context of Cooper's responding to changing political, social, and economic realities in his time period.

The gilded and red tole chandelier hanging in the library of the White House in Washington DC is from the family of James Fenimore Cooper.