Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 99Perhaps; and, if so, the novel is as much a new Western as a traditional one, mapping
out the destructive tendencies of the westward movement as well as its place in a
heroic tale of national expansion. One further layer of complexity is then added to a
narrative that is, in any event, a debate and a mythic drama, a great historical novel
and an American epic in prose.
A year before the publication of The Prairie, Cooper took his family to Europe. He
traveled there, worked as a diplomat, but still found time to write. Books written
during this period include The Red Rover (1827), a novel of early frontier life, The
Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), and another sea tale called The Water Witch (1830).
He also completed a historical trilogy: The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832),
and The Headsman (1833). A year before the final volume of the trilogy was published,
he returned to the United States. By now, he was becoming repelled by what he
considered to be the absence of public and private virtues in his country, and by the
abuses of democracy. In A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), The Monikins (1835),
and The American Democrat (1838) he investigated these problems from the
standpoint of an aristocratic democrat. In the novels Homeward Bound (1838) and
Home as Found (1838), in turn, he offered fictional explorations of his beliefs. For his
attacks on populism, and the politics of Jacksonian democracy, Cooper was vilified
in the press. He responded by successfully suing for libel. And his writing continued
unabated. In the last ten years of his life, in fact, he produced no less than 21 books:
among them, more novels set all or in part at sea (like Afloat and Ashore (1844) and
Miles Wallingford (1844)), several scholarly and factual works (including a History of
the Navy (1843)), a number of historical romances (such as The Oak Openings
(1848)), a utopian social allegory (The Crater (1848)), and a novel concerned with
the perversion of social justice that is often considered an anticipation of the modern
mystery novel (The Ways of the Hour (1850)). Perhaps the most notable publication
of his last few years, though, was the trilogy known as the Littlepage manuscripts,
Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846). These three
novels trace the growing tension between the propertied and the propertyless classes
in New York State from the colonial period to the 1840s. In the process, they reveal
Cooper’s continuing interest in adopting and developing different fictional forms,
while dramatically interrogating the conflicts at work in American society. Cooper
was a great innovator. At his best, as in the Leatherstocking Tales, he was also a great
creator of American myths. And through all his fictional innovations, he returned
compulsively to issues that were to haunt many later American writers: the different
routes a democratic republic might take, the conflict between law and freedom, the
clearing and the wilderness, communal ethics and the creed of self-reliance.
Over the three decades when the Leatherstocking series was written, many other
attempts were made to translate experience in the West into literature. Notable
among these were two novels, Logan: A Family History (1822) and Nick of the Woods;
or, The Jibbenainesay (1837), and an autobiographical narrative first serialized in
The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1847 and then published in 1849, The Oregon Trail.
Logan: A Family History was one of the several novels and many publications of John
Neal (1793–1876). Born into a Quaker family in Maine, Neal was an endlesslyGGray_c02.indd 99ray_c 02 .indd 99 8 8/1/2011 7:54:37 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 37 AM