Glens Falls and James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), raised in Cooperstown, New York, attended Yale College, served as a Midshipman in the early United States Navy, and in 1820 began a lifelong career as America’s first successful novelist. He became America’s first great novelist and a symbol of the United States and its early history, chronicling the American wilderness, portraying Native Americans with sympathy and understanding, and recognizing the human cost of building a new nation. In The Spy (1821) he wrote of George Washington and the American Revolution, in The Pioneers (1823) he depicted the New York frontier community in which he had been raised, in The Pilot (1824) he created the first novel of the sea from the imagined adventures of John Paul Jones, and in Lionel Lincoln (1825) he gave what Revolutionary War veterans remembered as the best literary account of the Battle of Bunker Hill. His works were eagerly read in America and reprinted abroad, often in translation. Cooper believed that America and the American character had roots in the colonial struggles between France and England, the dispossession of Native Americans from a harsh wilderness, and the haunting presence of people of African birth and descent whom white colonials had enslaved, and he brought these strands together in The Last of the Mohicans. In the summer of 1824, while escorting four young English aristocrats through the Lake Champlain, Lake George, and upper Hudson River region, he visited Glens Falls, where the group explored the island in the middle of the river, with waterfalls on either side, and walked through caves carved by erosion. After one of the Englishmen remarked that the cave would make a strong setting for a novel about Indians, Cooper’s imagination was stirred, and The Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826.

South Glens Falls, New York · United States