In the spring of 1820, with no apparent warning, James Cooper decided to become a writer. His creative life, like Whitman's, came to a boil. So radical was the transmutation that it is more difficult to recognize the latent novelist in the gentleman farmer than to divine Leaves of Grass in the pages of The Democratic Review or the Brooklyn Eagle. Yet in order to understand why Cooper persistently identified with the social authority wielded by frontier patriarchs, it is essential to know the pressures responsible for the alchemic change of his thirty-first year.

The mythology of Cooper's transformation follows a formulaic pattern. Impatient with reading aloud a tedious, imported novel of manners, Cooper reportedly threw it down and declared to his wife that he could write a better one. Not unaccustomed to her husband's flamboyant self-assertion after nine years of marriage, Susan De Lancey Cooper challenged him to prove it. In her daughter's words: “Our Mother laughed at the idea, as the height of absurdity – he who disliked writing even a letter, that he should write a book!!” After setting aside an initial moral tale, he sequestered himself in the drawing room each morning until he produced Precaution (Beard 24).

At no point is it more important to embrace D. H. Lawrence's caveat “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” than when approaching stories about the origin of a writer's career.