Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 95these Western travels were A Tour of the Prairie, one of three volumes in The Crayon
Miscellany (1835), and Astoria (1836), an account of the fur-trading empire of John
Jacob Astor. Both books evoke the romance of the West but none of its rigors; and
the later book idealizes the business tycoon Astor, at whose suggestion it was written.
Other books followed: among them, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A.
(1837), Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of Irving’s literary masters,
A Book of the Hudson (1849), and a monumental Life of Washington (1855–1859) in
five volumes. Irving’s literary career was erratic, and he never recovered the wit and
fluency of his early style; he also tended, especially in his later work, to bathe the
European past in an aura of romance. Nevertheless, in his best work, he was a creator
of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic substance and shape to
the radical changes of the time, and the nervousness and nostalgia those changes
often engendered. Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths in particular
because the nervousness about the new America, and nostalgia for the old – and,
beyond that, for Europe – were something that he himself felt intensely. He was
writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.The making of Western myth
Legend of a very different kind was the work of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–
1851). If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, and all
its spellbinding contradictions, then Cooper was. But he was far more than that. He
was the founding father of the American historical novel, exploring the contradictions
of American society in a time of profound change. He also helped to develop and
popularize such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners,
political satire and allegory, and the dynastic novel in which over several generations
American social practices and principles are subjected to rigorous dramatic analysis.
Cooper did not begin writing and publishing until his thirties. Before that, he had
served at sea, then left to marry and settle as a country gentleman in New York State.
His first novel, Precaution (1820), was in fact written after his wife challenged his
claim that he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her.
A conventional novel of manners set in genteel English society, this was followed by
a far better work, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Set in Revolutionary
New York State, on the “neutral ground” of Westchester County, its hero is Harvey
Birch, who is supposed to be a Loyalist spy but is secretly in the service of General
Washington. Birch is faithful to the Revolutionary cause but a convoluted plot
reveals his emotional ties to some of the Loyalists. What the reader is presented with
here, in short, is a character prototype that Cooper had learned from Sir Walter Scott
and was to use in later fiction, most notably in his portrait of Natty Bumppo, the
hero of the Leatherstocking novels. The hero is himself a “neutral ground” to the
extent that he, his actions and allegiances, provide an opportunity for opposing
social forces to be brought into a human relationship with one another. The moral
landscape he negotiates is a place of crisis and collision; and that crisis and collision
are expressed in personal as well as a social terms, as a function of character as wellGGray_c02.indd 95ray_c 02 .indd 95 8 8/1/2011 7:54:37 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 37 AM