A reflection of indian life in the works of fenimore cooper

Historical and nautical work
F. Cooper’s historical account of the U.S. Navy was well received, though his account of the roles played by the American leaders in the Battle of Lake Erie led to years of disputes with their descendants, as noted below. Cooper had begun thinking about this massive project, and concentrated on its research in the late 1830s. His close association with the U.S. Navy and various officers, and his familiarity with naval life at sea provided him the background and connections to research and write this work. Cooper's work is said to have stood the test of time and is considered an authoritative account of the U.S. Navy during that time.
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, 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
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brig USS Somers for mutiny while at sea. One of the hanged men, 19-year-old Philip Spencer, was the son of U.S. Secretary of War John C. Spencer. He was executed without court-martial along with two other sailors aboard the Somers for allegedly attempting mutiny. Prior to this affair, Cooper and Mackenzie had disputed each other's version of the Battle of Lake Erie. However, recognizing the need for absolute discipline in a warship at sea, Cooper still felt sympathetic to Mackenzie over his pending court martial.
In 1843, an old shipmate, Ned Myers, re-entered Cooper's life. To assist him—and hopefully to cash in on the popularity of maritime biographies—Cooper wrote Myers's story which he published as Ned Myers, or a Life before the Mast, an account of a common seaman still of interest to naval historians.
Later Cooper published Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers covering the biographies of William Bainbridge, Richard Somers, John Shaw, John T. Shubrick, and Edward Preble. Cooper died in 1851. In 1853, Cooper's Old Ironsides appeared in Putnam's Monthly.⁴ It was the history of the Navy ship USS Constitution and, after European and American Scenery Compared, was one of several posthumous publication of his writings. Five years after Cooper's death, his History of the Navy of the United States of America was re-published in an expanded edition. The work was an account of the U.S. Navy in the early 19th century, through the Mexican War. Among naval historians of today, the work has come to be recognized as a general and authoritative account. However, it was criticized for accuracy on some points by some contemporaries, especially those engaged in the disputes over the roles of their relatives in Cooper's separate history of the Battle of Lake Erie. Whig editors of the period regularly attacked anything Cooper wrote, leading him to numerous suits for libel, for example against Park Benjamin, a poet and editor of
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⁴ Long, Robert Emmet (1990). James Fenimore Cooper.
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the Evening Signal of New York.
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. Criticism in print of his naval histories and the two Home novels came largely from newspapers supporting The Whig party, reflecting the antagonism between the Whigs and their opposition, the Democrats, whose policies Cooper often favored. Cooper's father William had been a staunch Federalist, a party now defunct but some of whose policies supporting large-scale capitalism the Whigs endorsed. Cooper himself had come to admire Thomas Jefferson, the bete-noire of the Federalists, and had supported Andrew Jackson's opposition to a National Bank. Never one to shrink from defending his personal honor and his sense of where the nation was erring, Cooper filed legal actions for libel against several Whig editors; his success with most of his lawsuits ironically led to more negative publicity from the Whig establishment.
Buoyed by his frequent victories in court, Cooper returned to writing with more energy and success than he had had for several years. As noted above, on May 10, 1839, he published his History of the U.S. Navy; his return to the Leatherstocking Tales series with The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea and The Deerslayer brought him renewed favorable reviews. But on occasion he returned to addressing public issues, most notably with a trilogy of novels called the Littlepage Manuscripts addressing the issues of the anti-rent wars. Public sentiment largely favored the anti-renters, and Cooper's reviews again were largely negative.
Cooper was one of the more popular 19th-century American authors, and his work was admired greatly throughout the world. While on his death bed, the Austrian composer Franz Schubert wanted most to read more of Cooper's novels. Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist and playwright, admired him greatly. Henry David Thoreau, while attending Harvard, incorporated some of Cooper's style in his own work. D.H. Lawrence believed that Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant,
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and Flaubert were all "so very obvious and coarse, besides the lovely, mature and sensitive art of Fennimore Cooper." Lawrence called The Deerslayer "one of the most beautiful and perfect books in the world: flawless as a jewel and of gem-like concentration."
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.
Cooper was one of the early major American novelists to include African, African-American and Native American characters in his works. In particular, Native Americans play central roles in his Leatherstocking Tales. However, his treatment of this group is complex and highlights the relationship between frontier settlers and American Indians as exemplified in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, depicting a captured white girl who marries an Indian chief and has a baby with him, but after several years is eventually returned to her parents. Often, he gives contrasting views of Native characters to emphasize their potential for good, or conversely, their proclivity for mayhem. Last of the Mohicans includes both the character of Magua, who fearing the extinction of his race at the hands of the whites savagely betrays them, as well as Chingachgook, the last chief of the Mohicans, who is portrayed as Natty Bumppo's noble, courageous, and heroic counterpart. In 1831, Cooper was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician.
According to Tad Szulc, Cooper was a devotee of Poland's causes . He organized a club in Paris to support the rebels, and brought flags of the defeated Polish rebel regiment from Warsaw to present them to the exiled leaders in Paris. With his friend the Marquis de La Fayette, he supported liberals during the regime changes in France and elsewhere in the 1830s.
Though some scholars have hesitated to classify Cooper as a strict Romantic, Victor Hugo pronounced him greatest novelist of the century outside
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France. Honoré de Balzac, while mocking a few of Cooper's novels and expressing reservations about his portrayal of characters, enthusiastically called The Pathfinder a masterpiece and professed great admiration for Cooper's portrayal of nature, only equalled in his view by Walter Scott. 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" .
Cooper was also criticized heavily in his day for his depiction of women characters in his work. James Russell Lowell, Cooper's contemporary and a critic, referred to it poetically in A Fable for Critics, writing, "... the women he draws from one model don't vary. All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie."
Cooper's lasting reputation today rests largely upon the five Leatherstocking Tales. 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." 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.
Cooper was honored on a U.S. commemorative stamp, the Famous American series, issued in 1940.
Three dining halls at the State University of New York at Oswego are named in Cooper's remembrance because of his temporary residence in Oswego and for setting some of his works there.
Cooper Park in Michigan's Comstock Township is named after him.
The New Jersey Turnpike has a James Fenimore Cooper service area, recognizing his birth in the state.
The gilded and red tole chandelier hanging in the library of the House  in
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Washington DC is from the family of James Fenimore Cooper. It was brought there through the efforts of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in her great White House restoration. The James Fenimore Cooper Memorial Prize at New York University is awarded annually to an outstanding undergraduate student of journalism.
In 2013, Cooper was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.
Cooper's novels were very popular in the rest of the world, including, for instance, Russia. In particular, great interest of the Russian public in Cooper's work was primarily incited by the novel The Pathfinder, which the renowned Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky declared to be "a Shakespearean drama in the form of a novel". The author was more recognizable by his middle name, Fenimore, exotic to many in Russia. This name became a symbol of exciting adventures among Russian readers. For example, in the 1977 Soviet movie The Secret of Fenimore (Russian: Тайна Фенимора), being the third part of a children's television mini-series Three Cheerful Shifts (Russian: Три весёлые смены, see Tri vesyolye smeny ), tells of a mysterious stranger known as Fenimore, visiting a boys' dorm in a summer camp nightly and relating fascinating stories about Indians and extraterrestrials.