James Fenimore Cooper

Long before baseball made this village famous, Cooperstown gave America one of its first great novelists: James Fenimore Cooper. Born in seventeen eighty-nine, he was brought here as an infant to the frontier settlement his father had founded, and the wild country around Otsego Lake shaped his imagination for life. Cooper became the author of the Leatherstocking Tales, five historical novels written between eighteen twenty-three and eighteen forty-one that introduced the frontier scout Natty Bumppo, one of the earliest truly American heroes in fiction.

The most famous of them, The Last of the Mohicans, published in eighteen twenty-six, is still read and filmed today. The others are The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. In these books Cooper wrestled with the collision between wilderness and settlement, between Native peoples and advancing colonists, the very transformation he had watched happen around his childhood home.

He is sometimes called the first major American novelist, the writer who proved the young country could produce literature of its own rather than importing it from Europe. Cooper died in eighteen fifty-one and is buried in the churchyard of Christ Church here in the village, beside his father and his wife, beneath a simple marble slab marked with a cross that has drawn literary pilgrims ever since.