James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific 19th-century American author who studied Latin and the classics at Yale University before channeling his extraordinary real-life history—ranging from getting expelled from college for blowing up a peer’s door to working as a U.S. Navy midshipman—into writing grand, fast-paced historical romances and nautical fiction that captivated global audiences with rugged wilderness survival, pioneering history, and complex cultural clashes on the early American frontier. His professional career took off in the 1820s after he boldly claimed he could write a better book than the one he was reading, ultimately inventing the American sea novel genre and meticulously creating the nation’s first iconic literary hero, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo.