Mary E. Phillips's biography of James Fenimore Cooper offers an affectionate, carefully researched portrait of the man behind America's frontier romances, tracing both the private life and the imaginative landscapes that shaped his fiction. It begins with Cooper's birth in Burlington, New Jersey, his English and American family roots, and the story of the name "Fenimore," preserved through the family's treasured box and inheritance. From there, the biography turns to Otsego County, Lake Otsego, and Cooperstown, where William Cooper's settlement, The Manor, and Otsego Hall rooted the family in a frontier world that would become the "Glimmerglass" of Cooper's novels. The narrative follows Cooper from this American beginning into the wider world: Yale, naval life, and the sea; then Europe, where he moved through French, English, and Italian society with wit and detachment, meeting figures such as Lafayette and Talleyrand. Richly illustrated with portraits, homes, medals, battle scenes, and landscapes, the work places Cooper in the vivid material and cultural settings that fed The Red Rover, The Prairie, and the Leatherstocking tales. It presents him as both a heroic American storyteller and a cosmopolitan literary figure shaped by wilderness, history, and transatlantic experience. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.