The Spy (Cooper novel)

The action takes place during the American Revolution, at "The Locusts", which was the name given to a Colonial-style home in Scarsdale, New York, that was built in 1787 by American Major William Popham, an officer who served on the staff of generals George Clinton and George Washington and who served as the 7th President-General of the Society of Cincinnati, the oldest patriotic organization in the United States.

[2] Harvey Birch, peddler and patriot, is a character remotely founded upon Enoch Crosby, a real spy who helped John Jay.

The publisher H. L. Barnum stated that a gentleman of "good standing and respectability" and a personal friend of Cooper had claimed that the author himself told him of the inspiration.

Barnum wrote of the connection in 1828 in his book The Spy Unmasked; or, Memoirs of Enoch Crosby, Alias Harvey Birch, The Hero of Mr. Cooper's Tale of the Neutral Ground: Being an Authentic Account of the Secret Services Which He Rendered to his Country During the Revolutionary War (Taken from His Own Lips, in Short-Hand).

[3] Cooper would again take up the subject of the American Revolution in his novel The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823–4), also inspired by historical figures.

In a contemporary letter to Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Cooper wrote he had "commenced another tale to be called the 'Spy'" with the "scene [set] in West-Chester County, and [at the] time of the revolutionary war.

He was straining to maintain his gentlemanly lifestyle after the collapse of his family fortune, and he wrote his first two novels to test the viability of income from authorship.

[13] The Spy was a direct influence on John Neal, who published his own Revolutionary War historical fiction novel, Seventy-Six, two years later in 1823 after he had received the requested feedback on the manuscript from Cooper.

[15] Neal in American Writers (1824–25) declared The Spy America's most popular novel, but critiqued it as "rather too full of stage-tricks and clap-traps.

La spia, overro, Il merciaiuolo americano, by Angelo Villanis [it] to a libretto by Felice Romani, premiered in Turin at the Teatro Sutera in 1849.