SOURCE: "Chapter IX," in James Fenimore Cooper, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1950, pp. 221-64.

In the following essay, Grossman discusses Cooper's political views and the influence of European values on his writings.

Cooper's literary career, beginning haphazardly without conscious preparation or plan and advancing rapidly to world fame, in its apparently eccentric course from the time of the European experience onward touches on almost every situation that can confront the American writer or that criticism insists on confronting him with. The questions so often argued since are thoroughly argued in Cooper's work and in contemporary criticism of it: whether an American writer expatriates himself and loses touch with his own country by living abroad; whether it is dangerous for his development to write on "foreign" subjects; the extent to which he should be influenced by popular opinion and, conversely, should try to influence it; his role in American civilization, and...