New York
- Pages
- about 45
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 50 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
{Text transcribed and annotated by Hugh MacDougall, Founder and
Secretary/Treasurer of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, who
will appreciate corrections and comments at jfcooper@wpe.com. All
material not from Cooper's text is enclosed in {curly} brackets.
{Introductory Note: In 1851, just before his death on the eve of
his 62nd birthday, James Fenimore Cooper was working a history of
New York City, for which he planned the title of "The Towns of
Manhattan." Cooper never completed it, and most of the parts of
the manuscript that he did complete were destroyed in a fire at
the printers after his death. The Introduction to the work,
however, survived, and was published during the Civil War in "The
Spirit of the Age" (New York: April 5-15, 1864), a fund-raising
publication of the American Sanitary Commission (predecessor of
the American Red Cross). Substantial excerpts were reprinted, as
"James Fenimore Cooper on Secession and States Rights" in the
"Continental Monthly: Devoted to Literature and National Policy,"
Vol. 6, No. 1 (July 1864), pp. 79-83.
The "Spirit of the Age"text was much later reprinted in book form
under the title of "New York" (New York: William Farquhar Payson,
1930) in a limited edition of 750 copies, with an introduction by
Dixon Ryan Fox, and was later re-issued in facsimile form
(Folcroft: PA., Folcroft Library Editions, 1973) in a limited
edition of 100 copies -- from which this text is taken.
{A few other surviving fragments from "The Towns of Manhattan"
were compiled in James F. Beard, Jr., "The First of Greater New
York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper's Last Work" (New York
Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, pp. 109-45,
April 1953).
{The text has been transcribed as written, except that because of
the limitations of the Gutenberg format, occasional words in
italics have been transcribed in ALL CAPITALS. Annotations
(identified by {curly} brackets, have been occasionally
added--identifying allusions, translating foreign terms, and
correcting a few obvious typographical errors.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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