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James Fenimore Cooper's Influence On American Culture

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On our way westward from Boston, we passed through Henderson, Kentucky where I met the James Fenimore Cooper. Ever since discovering The Leatherstocking Tales during my studies at the College of William and Mary, I have been admirer of Cooper’s many literature works. I always wondered how he was able to capture the untouched wilderness of the west in his novels, and yet display an array of emotions in his characters. It was his novels that inspired my dream to embark in this trip.
The unfortunate event of the wagon wheels breaking apart led me into the honorable presence of James Fenimore Cooper. It all began with my sitting along the dirt path with Gideon on a humid summer day when another wagon pulled up, in which several men inside offered his help to repair our wheels. Surprising me the most of all, one man appeared to be Cooper with his wagon filled with novels and …show more content…

When he realized that we shared similar views, he was elated because he had become bitter with the attacks upon his political and literary efforts, in which he interpreted it as a decline of republicanism in America and the influence of foreign, aristocratic ideas on public opinion. From that moment, I finally understood the relationship between politics and literature by how they closely influence one another, like how he portrayed them in his novels. Furthermore, he recognized that I was curious on his view of the transforming language due to his early experiences of the birth of the Constitution. I bombarded him with my many inquiries of his writing style, such as the use of certain words like using “sundown” for “sunset”. Amused with this specific enquiry, he replied, “It is scarcely necessary to tell the intelligent reader that an author is not responsible for words of local use, when used in the mouths of his

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