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 "From the very beginning of his career, Cooper sought to understand the relation of the moral and the material. As befits an apprentice work, Cooper’s first novel, Precaution (1820), shows his understanding in the simplest, least sophisticated outline. Unfortunately, Precaution has usually been treated not as an apprentice work but rather as a mistake, an attempt at an Anglophiliac novel that he would not repeat. Two post-mortem texts, which otherwise are useful sources for Cooper scholars, are responsible for this view. The first was by Francis Parkman who, shortly after Cooper’s death in 1851, wrote an elegiac review of the ‘Author’s Revised Edition’ of Cooper’s Works. Parkman claimed that ‘of all American writers, Cooper is the most original, the most thoroughly national.’ As a result, his work was ‘a faithful mirror of that rude ... nature, which to European eyes appears so strange and new.’" |
