James Fenimore Cooper by Wayne Franklin

Author:Wayne Franklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300229103
Publisher: Yale University Press

Earth Histories

In late March 1847, when Cooper informed Richard Bentley that the expanded “Islets of the Gulf” could be issued as a book, he also mentioned that he had a new novel “about half done.” He described that book, to be called The Crater, and stated his terms for it, to which Bentley assented in a letter written late the following month (LJ 5:198–99).44 Evidently begun the previous fall, perhaps while Cooper was still finishing his Florida story (so thought his daughter Susan—see JT HE vii), this account of a Pacific utopia drew on a large background that we will explore after tracing out its various practical and thematic links to Jack Tier, as well as the slightly earlier Afloat and Ashore.

Early in May, while awaiting Bentley’s answer on The Crater, Cooper wrote out in his own hand and then signed with Burgess and Stringer in Manhattan a double agreement covering both it and the book version of the Graham’s tale.45 A June trip to Detroit to deal with debts owed him on the Comstock venture (treated in the next chapter) delayed him somewhat. But once he came home, he worked so efficiently that he finished the new novel by the start of August; then, with about half of it stereotyped already, he packed up the new copy and went to Philadelphia to correct the rest of Fagan’s sheets at the rate of “40 pages a day” (LJ 5:227–29).46 He completed that work around the middle of the month and, after a quick stop in New York to dispatch Bentley’s last sheets, rushed home again. Bentley, who therefore must have had all the proofs by mid-September, published the book as Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater on the twenty-seventh of that month. Burgess and Stringer published it on October 12 or so, slightly more than two weeks after Bentley (S&B 150; BAL 2:301).47

It will be recalled that Jack Tier, although mostly if not completely written (and published serially) before The Crater, was not to appear in book form until more than four months later, on or about March 4, 1848, also from Burgess and Stringer (and from Bentley, as Captain Spike, on March 11). That the books appeared in reverse order is clear not only from various bits of documentary evidence cited earlier but also, and more interestingly, from their syncopated bearing on the Mexican American War. Modest as the conflict’s effect admittedly was on “Islets of the Gulf,” by the time Cooper began work on The Crater much of the uncertainty accompanying the war’s earlier episodes had dissipated, so that he mostly ignored it as a literary topic even as he remained personally very interested in its conduct and outcome.48 Few of the involved political and military maneuvers in California overtly entered into his Pacific narrative, perhaps because the larger strategic picture now seemed relatively unproblematic. Not until the twentieth chapter of The Crater do we find a fleeting, relatively upbeat reference to the distant likelihood of California’s statehood (“Californians may be admitted to an equal participation in the rights of American citizens”—CR 2:67).

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