had the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his
personal experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe
the real romance of the American wilderness.

That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities
of this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker
youth of Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had
tried his hand at the very end of the eighteenth century upon
American variations of the Gothic romance then popular in
England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of the American
landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for
passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs,
murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he
had read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of
the art of fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman,
Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of eloquent prose, who
had transferred to the pages of his American Indian stories,
"Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark
forests
and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is
feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like
a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper,
like Scott, is masculine.

He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his
childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown
in Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a
brief and inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He
went to sea for two years, and then served for three years in the
United States Navy upon Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very