The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground is a novel by American writer James Fenimore Cooper. His second novel, it was published in 1821 by Wiley & Halsted. The plot is set during the American Revolution and was inspired in part by the family friend John Jay. [1] The Spy was successful and began Cooper's reputation as a popular and important American writer.
The action takes place during the American Revolution, at "The Locusts", which was the name given to a Colonial-style home in Scarsdale, New York, that was built in 1787 by Major William Popham, an officer who served on the staff of generals George Clinton and George Washington and who served as the 7th President-General of the Society of Cincinnati, the oldest patriotic organization in the United States. The plot ranges back and forth over the neutral ground between the British and the Continental armies as the home stands between those lines.
An unknown man, known as Mr. Harper, asks for shelter at The Locusts amidst a storm. Mr. Wharton (a British sympathizer), his daughters Sarah and Frances, and sister-in-law Miss Peyton, agree to admit him into their home. They are suspicious of him and are cautious in discussing the revolution in his presence. Soon, a peddler named Harvey Birch comes along, with an unknown man, also seeking shelter. Harper eyes him carefully. The stranger is really Henry Wharton, a British captain. Harper leaves the family, but not before revealing he was already aware of the true identity of Captain Wharton. Birch, who has met privately with Mr. Harper for unknown reasons, strongly urges Captain Wharton to return to his post.
A group of colonial troops investigates the home of Birch, before making their way to The Locusts. There, Major Peyton Dunwoodie is confronted by Frances Wharton, who loves him and sympathizes with the revolutionary cause. She pleads with him not to arrest or harm her brother, Captain Wharton, but Dunwoodie feels his duty too strongly. He learns that Captain Wharton has disguised himself and used a letter forged with George Washington's signature to avoid being found. Dunwoodie realizes that Washington's signature is authentic, however, but the Captain cannot explain how he procured it. Dunwoodie arrests Captain Wharton but learns British troops are in the area. Dunwoodie rushes to assist his fellow colonists, allowing Captain Wharton to escape in the confusion. Captain Wharton tells the British commanding officer, Colonel Wellmere, to beware of Dunwoodie and his fellow troops. Wellmere does not take his advice and skirmish ensues; he is injured and Captain Wharton is recaptured by Captain Lawton. As the British troops make their retreat, Dunwoodie brings his friend Captain Singleton to The Locusts to be cared for by Dr. Sitgreaves. Frances suggests summoning Singleton's sister to assist.
Harvey Birch comes under suspicion for being a British spy although he is really a patriot. Harper is actually George Washington in disguise with whom Birch has other meetings in the course of the book. Birch's role is revealed only after he falls in battle. [2]
Harvey Birch, peddler and patriot, is a character remotely founded upon Enoch Crosby, a real spy who helped John Jay. The publisher H. L. Barnum stated that a gentleman of "good standing and respectability" and a personal friend of Cooper had claimed that the author himself told him of the inspiration. Barnum wrote of the connection in 1828 in his book The Spy Unmasked; or, Memoirs of Enoch Crosby, Alias Harvey Birch, The Hero of Mr. Cooper's Tale of the Neutral Ground: Being an Authentic Account of the Secret Services Which He Rendered to his Country During the Revolutionary War (Taken from His Own Lips, in Short-Hand). [3] Cooper would again take up the subject of the American Revolution in his novel The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823–4), also inspired by historical figures. [4]
Cooper began writing The Spy as early as June 1820, shortly after publishing his book Precaution . In a contemporary letter to Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Cooper wrote he had "commenced another tale to be called the 'Spy'" with the "scene [set] in West-Chester County, and [at the] time of the revolutionary war." [5] The work-in-progress was inspired with persuasion from his wife, Susan, who Cooper referred to as his "female Mentor". [6] Cooper's choice of subject was directly in response to critics of his first book, who wished he would write on more American subjects. Patriotism, Cooper vowed, would be his main theme. [7] He anticipated that the book would be superior to his previous effort but admitted to Goodrich on July 12, 1820, that work on the book "goes on slowly" and it would not be finished until the fall. [8]
The novel was successful, and its success came at a critical time in Cooper's life. He was straining to maintain his gentlemanly lifestyle after the collapse of his family fortune, and he wrote his first two novels to test the viability of income from authorship. [9] The original print run of 1000 copies sold out in the first month, with at least 600 copies sold within a year, which earned him royalties of $4000. [10] Years later, in 1831, Cooper gave credit for the book's success on the "love of country" among his American readers. [11] The Literary World later reflected that the book was among the first to celebrate the United States in such a way: "Before 'The Spy' we believe there is scarcely to be found a book from an American pen, in which there is an attempt to delineate American character or scenery, or which selects the soil of the United States as the field of its story". [12] A review in the North American Review noted the book "laid the foundations of American romance". [7]
The book's central character, Harvey Birch, prefigures many of the qualities that Cooper would use in his more famous character, Natty Bumppo, who stars in Cooper's series of books known as Leatherstocking Tales . Birch is an adventurer who resists marrying and traditional society to withdraw into his own natural, moral world. [13]
The Spy was a direct influence on John Neal, who published his own Revolutionary War historical fiction novel, Seventy-Six , two years later in 1823 after he had received the requested feedback on the manuscript from Cooper. [14] Neal's novel provided a stark contrast to Cooper's work in its use of American colloquial language, profanity, and conversational narration and earned him a reputation as Cooper's chief rival as leading American author. [15] Neal in American Writers (1824–25) declared The Spy America's most popular novel, but critiqued it as "rather too full of stage-tricks and clap-traps. The disguises; the pathos; the love-parts; the heroines—are all contemptible." [16]
Two operatic adaptations of the novel exist. La spia, overro, Il merciaiuolo americano, by Angelo Villanis to a libretto by Felice Romani, premiered in Turin at the Teatro Sutera in 1849. [17] [18] The other, by Luigi Arditi to a libretto by Filippo Manetta, premiered in New York City at the Academy of Music on March 24, 1856. [19] [20]
The Last of the Mohicans is a 1920 American silent adventure drama film written by Robert A. Dillon, adapted from James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel of the same name. Clarence Brown and Maurice Tourneur co-directed the film. It is a story of two English sisters meeting danger on the frontier of the American colonies, in and around the fort commanded by their father. The adventure film stars Wallace Beery, Barbara Bedford, Lillian Hall, Alan Roscoe and Boris Karloff in one of his earliest silent film roles. Barbara Bedford later married her co-star in the film, Alan Roscoe in real life. The production was shot near Big Bear Lake and in Yosemite Valley.
James Fenimore Cooper was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century, whose historical romances depicting colonial and indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought him fame and fortune. He lived much of his boyhood and his last fifteen years in Cooperstown, New York, which was founded by his father William Cooper on property that he owned. Cooper became a member of the Episcopal Church shortly before his death and contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is an 1826 historical romance novel by James Fenimore Cooper. It is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known to contemporary audiences. The Pathfinder, published 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel; its prequel, The Deerslayer, was published a year after The Pathfinder. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent on Indigenous forces since they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the British. Specifically, the events of the novel are set immediately before, during, and after the Siege of Fort William Henry.
The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth-century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York. Each novel features Natty Bumppo, a frontiersman known to European-American settlers as "Leatherstocking", "The Pathfinder", and "the trapper". Native Americans call him "Deerslayer", "La Longue Carabine", and "Hawkeye".
The capture and rescue of Jemima Boone and the Callaway girls is a famous incident in the colonial history of Kentucky. Three girls were captured by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party on July 14, 1776, and rescued three days later by Daniel Boone and his party, celebrated for their success. The incident was portrayed in 19th-century literature and paintings: James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Charles Ferdinand Wimar painted The Abduction of Boone's Daughter by the Indians.
Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is a fictional character and the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. He appears throughout the series as an archetypal American ranger, and has been portrayed many times in a variety of media in popular culture.
Precaution (1820) is the first novel by American author James Fenimore Cooper.
Abraham Woodhull was a leading member of the Culper Spy Ring in New York City and Setauket, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. He used the alias "Samuel Culper", which was a play on Culpeper County, Virginia, and was suggested by George Washington.
Reginald Bathurst Birch was an English-American artist and illustrator. He was best known for his depiction of the titular hero of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, which started a craze in juvenile fashion. While his illustrated corpus has eclipsed his other work, he was also an accomplished painter of portraits and landscapes.
Enoch Crosby (1750–1835) was an American spy and soldier during the American Revolution. His life may have been the basis for the character Harvey Birch in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Spy.
The Bravo is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1831 in two volumes. Inspired by a trip to Europe where he traveled through much of Italy, the novel is set in Venice. The Bravo is the first of Cooper's three novels to be set in Europe. This group of three novels, which one critic would call Cooper's "European trilogy", include The Heidenmauer and The Headsman. Like his other novels set in Europe, The Bravo was not very well received in the United States. The book largely focuses on political themes, especially the tension between the social elite and other classes.
Lionel Lincoln is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in 1825. Set in the American Revolutionary War, the novel follows Lionel Lincoln, a Boston-born American of British noble descent who goes to England and returns a British soldier, and is forced to deal with the split loyalties in his family and friends to the American colonies and the British homeland. At the end of the novel, he returns to England with his wife Cecil, another American born cousin.
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is an essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire of literary criticism and as a critique of the writings of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that appeared in the July 1895 issue of North American Review. It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.
The Chesapeake–Leopard affair was a naval engagement off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, on June 22, 1807, between the British fourth-rate HMS Leopard and the American frigate USS Chesapeake. The crew of Leopard pursued, attacked, and boarded the American frigate, looking for deserters from the Royal Navy. Chesapeake was caught unprepared and after a short battle involving broadsides received from Leopard, the commander of Chesapeake, James Barron, surrendered his vessel to the British. Chesapeake had fired only one shot.
The Pathfinder is a 1952 American adventure historical western film directed by Sidney Salkow and starring George Montgomery, Helena Carter and Jay Silverheels. It is based on the 1840 novel The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper and was produced by Sam Katzman for Columbia Pictures.
Nautical fiction, frequently also naval fiction, sea fiction, naval adventure fiction or maritime fiction, is a genre of literature with a setting on or near the sea, that focuses on the human relationship to the sea and sea voyages and highlights nautical culture in these environments. The settings of nautical fiction vary greatly, including merchant ships, liners, naval ships, fishing vessels, life boats, etc., along with sea ports and fishing villages. When describing nautical fiction, scholars most frequently refer to novels, novellas, and short stories, sometimes under the name of sea novels or sea stories. These works are sometimes adapted for the theatre, film and television.
The Monikins is an 1835 novel, written by James Fenimore Cooper. The novel, a beast fable, was written between his composition of two of his more famous novels from the Leatherstocking Tales, The Prairie and The Pathfinder. The critic Christina Starobin compares the novel's plot to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The novel is a satire, narrated by the main character, the English Sir John Goldencalf. Goldencalf and the American captain Noah Poke travel on a series of humorous adventures to an Antarctic archipelago inhabited by a race of civilized monkeys.
The Water-Witch is an 1830 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Set in 17th-century New York and the surrounding sea, the novel depicts the abduction of a woman, Alida de Barbérie, by the pirate captain of the brigantine Water-Witch, and the subsequent pursuit of that elusive ship by her suitor, Captain Ludlow.
Wyandotté is a historical novel published by James Fenimore Cooper in 1843. The novel is set in New York state during the American Revolution. The main character of the novel is an Indian, "Saucy Nick", also called Wyandotté, whose depictions violate stereotypes of Native Americans.
The Spy is a 1914 American silent adventure film based on the 1821 novel of the same name by James Fenimore Cooper, directed by Otis Turner, and released by Universal Studios.
Media related to The Spy (Cooper novel) at Wikimedia Commons
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