Twenty years later James Fenimore Cooper (I789–I851) discov ered in his negligible domestic romance Precaution (182o) that he had a hitherto undiscovered gift. Stimulated by friendly critics to write of matters more nearly native to his experience, he fol lowed with The Spy (1821), a tale of the Revolution, which was set in his own neighbourhood, with The Pioneers (1823), a story of the frontier on which he had grown up and with The Pilot (1824), a sea-story for which his years in merchant shipping and the navy had equipped him. With these three tales, American in subject matter and point of view, natural and spirited in treat ment and peopled with real characters acting against real back grounds, the genuine American novel came into existence. In his nearly 3o years of authorship Cooper completed the Leather stocking series of which The Pioneers, first to be written, is fourth to be read. The others in story progression are The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (184o) and The Prairie (1827), in which he showed how vainly he strug gled to reconcile aristocratic prejudice with democratic theory.
By the time of Cooper's death in 1851 the output of novels, which largely paralleled his in their resort to the settlement, the frontier and the Revolutionary War, was considerable in size but inconsiderable in value. In New England John Neal, with The Down-Easters (1833), D. P. Thompson, with The Green Moun tain Boys (1839) and Sylvester Judd, with Margaret (1845) took up the chronicle. J. P. Kennedy expounded Virginia in Swallow Barn (1832) and the Carolinas in Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835). And the inclination to follow the retreating frontier was marked by J. K. Paulding's Westward Ho! (1832), R. M. Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837) Mrs. C. M. S. Kirkland's A New Home— Who'll Follow (1839) as well as by most of the voluminous work of Wm. Gilmore Simms (1806-7o). Just as Cooper was often referred to as the American Scott, Simms, with better reason, was frequently called the Southern Cooper. He complemented Cooper's success with the frontier by his own with the settlement and the Revolution. Of his seven novels of the war The Partisan (1835) is the sturdiest survivor, and of his many tales of the settlement, Beauchampe (1842) is perhaps pre-eminent.
In these years, however, Herman Melville (1819-91) began the work which culminated in the year of Cooper's death with Moby Dick (i851), one of the greatest novels of the century in the English language. Several years in early manhood spent in merchant shipping and whaling supplied him with his philosophic point of view and with most of his material. Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) were the first literary fruits of his wanderings, a continuous narrative of South Sea adventure interlarded with drastic criticism of the invading whites. Mardi (1849), retaining all his zest for the sea, passed over to the realm of allegory from which Melville was never to return, in the tale of a world-wide quest for Unattainable Beauty, incarnate in the maiden, Yillaz.
And White Jacket (185o), the story of his return to Western life on an American warship, is characteristic of its author in its com bination of cyclopaedic fact and elaborate allegory. Moby Dick, Melville's masterpiece, the pursuit of a hopeless conflict with fate waged by Captain Ahab, a Promethean whaler, is a story which moves with grim relentlessness to its tragic conclusion. With Moby Dick Melville's major achievement was at an end, though the early successes cannot be fully understood without careful reading of Pierre (1852), Israel Potter (1855), Piazza Tales (1856), The Confidence Man (1857), his privately printed verse and the posthumous novel Billy Budd (1924).
America had as yet shown no bent for realism in fiction except in one or two distorted satires by Cooper. The turn to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) is a turn only to another type of romance. An unusually long period of solitary preparation, marked only by a few score short tales and sketches brought him to maturity and recognition at the age of 46 with The Scarlet Letter (185o). He is known as a novelist for The Blithedale Romance (1852), The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Marble Faun (186o); although in addition to the suppressed Fanshawe (5828), Septimius Felton (1872), Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (1882) and the uncompleted Dolliver Romance were all posthumously published. His romances proceed almost by formula, each dominated by a physical symbol, each told in terms of a small group of char acters with a hyper-sensitive central figure, each developed mainly through analysis and interpretation of the changing moods of the markedly inactive actors, each garnished with many a medita tive commentary on the text, each critical of the Puritan tradition which dominated the author's past and present and each inquisi tive as to the mystery of life and the hidden sources of its visible phenomena.
The decade which was ushered in by Moby Dick was escorted to its end by a host of sentimental tales for Eirls and robust adventure stories for boys. Only one novel was taken seriously by adults, Mrs. H. B. Stowe's (1811-96) enormously successful propagandist tale, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Mrs. Stowe felt no pride in it as a story, but as a popular document she com posed it with great skill and through it she discovered the inher ent ability which she vented not only in the second anti-slavery tale Dred (1856), but also in a succession of discriminating pic tures of New England life, of which The Minister's Wooing (1859) and Oldtown Folks (1869) are worthy of remark. Her work marks the turn to a definite current of realism.