New York

New York is one of James Fenimore Cooper’s lesser known works, a piece of nonfiction or fictional reflection on the city and state that had shaped his life and his writing across his career. Cooper had spent significant time in New York City and had inherited substantial property in the upstate New York countryside through his Cooperstown family connections, and his various writings on the city and the state reflect the particular insider knowledge that his complicated relationship with the place had produced.

The piece may be a fragmentary or unfinished work that Cooper produced late in his career, when he was working on multiple projects simultaneously and publishing various essays and shorter works alongside his major novels. Cooper’s late career writing often took the form of political and social commentary aimed at the contemporary issues he was concerned about, with the rapid democratization of New York politics and the economic transformations of the nineteenth century city giving him plenty to write about. His political views were considerably more conservative than the dominant Jacksonian and later Democratic tendencies of the period, and his New York writings often took up the various political controversies that the changing city and state were producing.

For Cooper completists, for students of nineteenth century American political and social commentary, or for readers interested in how the leading American novelist of the era thought about the city and state where he had built his career, New York is worth knowing. The piece is short by comparison with Cooper’s major novels and would have functioned as part of the wider body of nonfiction and shorter writing that filled out his late career publishing schedule.

Cooper’s prose in his nonfiction is in the formal style of his time, which can take some getting used to. The political and social commentary is more directly stated than in his fiction, with Cooper making arguments that he had been gesturing at in his late novels with more directness in pieces like this one. Modern readers will find his conservative framing more pronounced than they expected from the author of the Leatherstocking Tales, but the engagement with the rapidly changing nineteenth century American political and economic situation is serious and worth reading on its own terms.

Many of Cooper’s late nonfiction pieces are now in the public domain and have been collected in various editions of his complete works.