Politics & Power Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Van Doren’s sentence performs a neat critical magic trick: it pretends to shrug at “mere coincidence” while quietly turning biography into a measuring stick for a whole national literature. By anchoring James Fenimore Cooper’s lifespan between two emblematic titles - Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (often tagged as America’s first novel) and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the blockbuster that fused fiction with moral emergency) - he makes Cooper less a solitary author than a living bracket around an era.

The intent is partly corrective. Cooper is frequently treated as a rugged mythmaker or an awkward stylist, but Van Doren is after scale: Cooper mattered because American fiction was still inventing its job description while he was alive. The subtext is that “American” fiction isn’t just a chronology; it’s a negotiation between sentiment, nation-building, and politics. The Power of Sympathy represents early domestic and didactic experimentation; Uncle Tom’s Cabin marks the moment the novel becomes a mass instrument of conscience. Cooper sits between them, helping fiction pivot from tentative imitation of British forms toward stories that sound like the country’s own arguments about land, identity, and belonging.

Even the phrasing “limits of his life” has bite. It suggests that literary periods are not cleanly defined by manifestos but by overlapping reputations, publishing economies, and readers’ appetites. Van Doren’s critical posture is historical, almost cartographic: draw two widely recognized points, connect them with a human life, and suddenly “the first great period” looks less like an abstraction and more like a lived continuum of cultural change.