James Fenimore Cooper had a very interesting life, molded American literature, and influenced many popular authors, such as Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain, through his “literary offenses.”(1) The experiences Cooper had throughout his life shaped his rogue character and literary style. The evidence of Cooper’s impact to American literature is well documented.
James Fenimore Cooper was born on September 15, 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey to William Cooper and Elizabeth Fenimore. James was the last of twelve children; only seven survived childhood: Richard, Hannah, Isaac, Ann, William and Samuel. Within the first year of James’ birth, he moved from New Jersey to the source of the Susquehanna
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At the age of 12, William Cooper resolved to send James to a Latin based boarding school run by Reverend Thomas Ellison. James’ closest companion in boarding school was William Jay, the second son of governor John Jay. They used to adventure around New York, especially in the excavated plot of land which Saint Peter’s Church would be built on, with other boys who would later become business for the state. This foreshadowed James’ trickster attitude. By the age of thirteen, James entered Yale College.
Some evidence to the claims of James’ rogue character surface during his time at Yale. Simply stated: Cooper was a prankster. It is reported that he put a donkey in a teacher’s classroom, and many other tricks. James never got into large trouble until his biggest prank: he blew up another student’s dorm door with gunpowder. By the age of 16, James Fenimore Cooper was expelled from Yale College.
Shortly after James left Yale, he enrolled in the Navy. There is little to no information about this time of his life other than it being a basis for his first book: Afloat and Ashore: A Sea Tale. On December 22, 1809, his father, William Cooper died from a blow to the back of the head delivered by a political opponent; this was a devastating episode as James was at sea when his father passed. Shortly after, James met Susan DeLancey, whom he married on on January 1, 1811. The DeLanceys were a wealthy family related to
James was born on December 23, 1856. He was the son of Washington and Artelia Duke. James's father Washington was a tobacco industrialist and philanthropist that fought in the Civil War and his mother Artelia was a German immigrant. James grew up on a small farm in Durham, North Carolina. During the Civil War, their farm was ravaged by the Union troops and they seized their tobacco barrels and crops.
James grew up in a racist and segregated part of history. Often times racial slurs were used to describe people of African descent during the time James was growing up. Even during school James would be called these horrendous names: “...someone in the back of the class whispered, “James is ni**er!” followed by a ripple of tittering and giggling across the room” (McBride 89). The fact that small school children call blacks these names shows how racist the many people are and the hatred and discrimination that blacks face. These experience taught James how people treat those that appear to be different. Another experience that taught James this was when he and his family went to the Jewish store and were discriminated against. McBride had many experiences in which he and his family were discriminated against whether it was by the police or store owners: “Some of these Jews can’t stand you” (86). All in all, incidents with people who have a particular dislike for blacks shaped James into the way
Everything started going downhill from there and that's where the conflict of interest begins. James left the house in the mornings but didn't go to school and says himself that he was practically a dropout. "I spent as much time away from home as possible. I quit church and avoided my deeply religious godparents. I was the first kid on my block to smoke cigarettes and reefer" (McBride, 138) shows the ways he was acting out, also including stealing from freight cars with his friends. He was even caught by the police once. With James out of the house all the time, his mother suffered more because no one was there to help her with her young children. He was hurting but was too stubborn to admit it and "reefer and wine helped me to forget any pain, and as the pain and guilt increased, my problems with drugs worsened" (McBride, 142). All the while his mother knew nothing about it. Until one day when he gave her a forged report card with a grade unlike his usual ones and she called the school only to find out something way worse than what she expected. From then on, James spent the summers with his sister Jack in Kentucky who his mother thought could straighten him out. Jack's husband lets James run free with him and he finds himself often at a place called the
James Wilson was born on September 14, 1742. He was born in Carskerdo, Scotland. He was the son of the respected farmer William Robert Covill Wilson (1692-1758) and Alison Landoll Wilson (1712-1792). James Wilson was the oldest of seven children. James’ dad wanted him to go to a Baptist school, but James ended up going to a Catholic school. James Wilson attended the Universities of St.Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Though he went to all these different schools, he failed to earn a degree. James decided that he would study law. After many years of hard work and determination, James Wilson earned an honorary master’s degree. As a kid, James worked on his father’s farm. As an adult, he taught at a college for a couple of years, then started studying law. He then eventually passed the bar in Philadelphia 1767. November 1771, James Wilson married Rachel Bird. The married couple later on had 6 children together who all helped around the farm.
One of the themes was the burden of secrets that were kept. As a young boy, James knew very little about his mother’s childhood background. James’s mother Ruth discouraged his curiosity about her past and her background. She really never wanted her kids to know the things that she went through as a child and as a young adult. She was ashamed of the things that she went through, so she kept everything inside.What I think is going to happen is that James is that he is gonna have to realize that he can not be out doing drugs and skipping school. also he is going to have to grow up really fast.
James W. Marshall was born in 1810 in New Jersey. His parents were Philip Marshall and Sarah Wilson. He had three other siblings and was the oldest. He was the only boy, all of his siblings were girls. In 1816 James’ dad had five acres of land and built a house on it. James was a carpenter and
James Buchanan was born on April 23rd, 1791 in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania. Buchanan’s parents James Buchanan Sr. and Elizabeth Speer were Ulster Scots; his father emigrated from Donegal, Ireland in 1783. He grew up with six sisters and four brothers in a log cabin until they moved to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania in 1797. Buchanan’s educational career consisted of attendance to Old Stone Academy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and Dickinson College (also in Carlisle, Pennsylvania) where he graduated with honors in 1807, he then moved to Lancaster and earned his law degree. In the War of 1812, Buchanan served in the defense of Baltimore and is known as the only president with military experience who never served as an officer. Although he claimed to love Anne Caroline Coleman, they were never married and after their breakup Buchanan sent the following letter to Corenelia Roosevelt which led people to question his sexual orientation.
James Madison was born on March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia, to Colonel James Madison Sr. and Eleanor Rose Conway. Madison and his siblings grew up into the Christian religion since his family was very religious. James had eleven other siblings and was the oldest out of them all. All his siblings were outgoing and playful, but James was the most fragile out of all his siblings due to Epileptoid Hysteria. Epileptiod Hysteria is a sickness that causes seizures, a fear that affects your mind, and it affects how you think about different situations. Due to
This is fueled by, not only the changing emotions that teenagers typically endure, but also by the death of his stepfather, whom he saw as his own father. After his death, James cannot bear to see his mother suffer, for she no longer knows how to control the dynamics of the family and "wandered in an emotional stupor for nearly a year." James instead turns to alcohol and drugs, dropping out of school to play music and go around with his friends, which James refers to as "my own process of running, emotionally disconnecting myself from her, as if by doing to I could keep her suffering from touching me." Instead of turning to his family and becoming "the king in the house, the oldest kid," James "spent as much time away from home as possible absolve[ing] [himself] of all responsibility " As a result, Ruth sends James to live with his older half sister and her husband, in an attempt to straighten her out her son's life. James distracts himself with the life he found there, spending the summers on a street corner with his half sister's husband, Big Richard, whom he adores, and the unique men that frequented the area. During these summers, James discovers "[He] could hide. No one knew [him]. No one knew [his] past, [his] white mother, [his] dead father, nothing. It was perfect. [His] problems seemed far, far away." Instead of facing the realities of loss and anger in his family, James seeks distractions
James Garfield was born on November 19, 1831, in Orange, Ohio, in a log cabin. His father died only two years after his birth, so his mother raised him along with his older siblings while still managing the family farm. During his teen years, he towed barges up the Ohio Canal in order to support his impoverished family. He was nicknamed “The Canal Boy”. He later attended the former Western Reserve Eclectic Institute,
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important authors in the history of American literature and the genre of Romanticism or Dark Romanticism, due to his unique style of writing and his focus upon subjects of Puritan religion and the unknown. I consider Hawthorne an important author, due to the fact that he skillfully and accurately based his fictional writings upon happenings of colonial times, was one of the first authors to display unfortunate outcomes for his characters’ immoral choices according to Puritan beliefs, and wrote of things that were considered taboo in his time, such as witchcraft, scientific innovation and experimentation. I strongly believe that Hawthorne’s influence for his writings were his Puritan ancestral background, his fascination with Puritan beliefs, and his interest in what was considered the unknown such as witchcraft and science. According to the Norton Anthology Textbook Vol. B, Nathaniel Hawthorne was “born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804” (370). Hawthorne belonged “to a family whose ancestral roots were tied to Puritan history, with his family being among the first settlers of Massachusetts and having one of his relatives serve as a judge during the Salem witch trials” (370). Hawthorne, as a young boy, “had a particular interest in writings such as John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, and by his mid-teens he took interest in British novelists such as Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, William Godwin, and Sir Walter Scott”
American literature 1865-1914 is an American literary time period that began in 1865 and ended in 1914. This time period was flourished by three distinct features and the first of these features is: The Aftermath of the Civil War. It is estimated that a total of 620,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War, and for what? At the time, we were an America that was divided by one huge issue that ran supreme and it was slavery and the unequal treatment of African Americans. At this time the nation needed to figure a way to unite the North who were against slavery and the South who were for slavery. As Abraham Lincoln says in our Bedford Anthology of American Literature: “No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man, we simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements,” (4). He is saying that we must not start a new, but rather we need to start from what we had and mould and shape our country into one. Prior to the Civil War, America was not a whole, it was ruled by states’ rights and was divided on countless issues, and when referring to America, people said the United States are… It wasn’t until under President Lincoln, and concluding the Civil War that the United States began to be referred to as the United States is.. Honest Abe, brought our nation together as one, but the racial tension that remained was something one man can never fix. The literature around this time period was dominated by ideas and feelings circled
In James’ case he knew that if he worked hard at school he could gain his fathers approval. However it seemed that he was in the shadow of his brother, who was also under the same pressure. He had turned to cheating to get better marks to avoid his father’s disapproval. James’ own sense of right and wrong were being clouded by his loyalty to- and competition with his brother, also his need for approval from his father and his sense of duty to protect his frail mother by “not
American writers have expressed their political and social views through their writing by attempting to establish a voice separate from Britain’s. Their fear of individual and national failure and their thirst for power consumes them and is evident in their writing. Washington Irving and Herman Melville involve the occupation of lawyers and Justices to bring in a patriotic element to influence residents of the young country as a way to share their concerns and inspire ambition. Their usage of metaphors and metonymy subtly convey a message of hope to white residents while, deflating the optimism of the soon to be freed slaves. This essay will prove that a critical reading of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Irving’s “The Legend of
Henry James author of ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ was one of five children and had an older brother William who was born in 1942 he had four younger siblings also; Garth Wilkinson born 1845, Robertson born 1846 and Alice born 1848.