James Fenimore Cooper and Natty Bumppo

In The Pioneers (1823), the inaugural novel in the five book Leatherstocking Series, James Fenimore Cooper created Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking and Hawkeye. In the prolific career that would follow, comprised of twenty-nine years of steady writing until his death in 1851, Cooper would not create any more memorable character than Natty Bumppo.

What is it about Natty Bumppo that makes him such a compelling character? Is he a representative American-type, and if so, what does this type suggest about American society and culture?

Natty Bumppo, interestingly enough, was always a character from the past, not the present--neither ours nor Cooper's. Natty is a protagonist in the historical romance tradition, a man from a bygone era, whose last appearance occurs in the 1827 novel The Prairie, which is set in 1804. Eighty-years has Natty Bumppo at the start of this novel as he manages a life west of the Mississippi River, away from the settlements.

By contrast, in 1804, Cooper himself was a wilfull fifteen-year old, in the midst of an unillustrious career at Yale. About a year or so later, he would be expelled for some ill-concieved pyrotechnics involving a dorm room door. Despite his restless spirit, the fifteen-year old Cooper could not have been any farther from the prairie. Nineteen-years later, with four spent at sea, Cooper would give birth to Natty Bumppo.

The Legacy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882): While beloved in the nineteenth-century for his heartfelt verse in poems like Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), critics and readers today often look askance at the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Terms like shallow, sentimental, and escapist today cast a long shadow over Longfellow. However, Longfellow keeps good company in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, where Longfellow's bust (and we imagine his spirit) converses with the immortals, the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. He remains the only American so honored. Having read, so far, long epic poems like Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, and shorter works like "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Fire of the Driftwood," and "The Wreck of the Hesperus," the questions our class have asked are whether Longfellow remains good company today and where does he stand among the nineteenth-century American Romantics. Is a Longfellow revival long overdue?

American Romanticism In Action

Welcome to our blog! We have created this venue to discuss major U.S. authors in the literary period known as American Romanticism and to put the knowledge generated from our undergraduate academic seminar at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania to work. American Romanticism "in action" depends on a single premise (which is perhaps a romantic one): when we lend our voices to the authors of the past--through reading, thinking about, discussing, and writing about texts--we intervene in history and make the past and present alive. These authors' words live as vividly today for readers as they did for readers in the past.