James Fenimore Cooper was inspired by a tale related to him by neighbor and family friend John Jay. It was more successful and became a bestseller; the setting of this Revolutionary War tale is widely believed to have been John Jay's family home "The Locusts" in Rye, New York. In 1823, Cooper published "The Pioneers", the first of the "Leatherstocking" series. The series features Natty Bumppo, a resourceful American woodsman at home with the Delaware Indians and their chief Chingachgook. Bumppo was also the main character of Cooper's most famous novel "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826), written in New York City where
Paul Fenimore Cooper to Nebraska State Representative Paul F. Clark. Cooper grew up in Cooperstown. He was educated at the private Taft School, at Yale College, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Yale he was an editor of campus humor magazine "The Yale Record". He married Marion Erskine. Their son Paul Fenimore (P. F. Cooper, Jr.) became a physicist and Arctic explorer; he was elected a Fellow of the Arctic Society in 1954. Some of Cooper's published books were "Tricks of Women and Other Albanian Tales" (1928), a translation of folk tales; "" (1929), a children's book about an orphan and the fantastical