Thomas R. Lounsbury's biography opens with a searching, corrective portrait of James Fenimore Cooper, grounding the novelist in the frontier world of Cooperstown, New York, where Otsego Lake, forests, hills, and the rough isolation of settlement fed the imagination that would later shape his great adventure tales. It traces Cooper's family roots, his mother's Fenimore lineage, and the myths that tried to recast him as somehow less American, while also showing the diverse, eccentric frontier community and stern classical education that formed him. Restless at Yale, he was dismissed after a prank, then learned the sea aboard the Sterling and in naval service around Lake Ontario, Niagara, and Lake Champlain—experiences that supplied the realism of his sea novels and wilderness fiction. After marriage to Susan DeLancey and a period of domestic quiet, Cooper began writing almost by accident with Precaution, then turned a bitter property dispute into Homeward Bound and Home as Found. These novels unleash his satirical attack on New York society, but also reveal his failure to convincingly render polished social life, exposing the limits of his social idealism and the uneasy temper that shadowed his literary rise. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.