The Spy A Tale Of The Neutral Ground Historical Novel

The Spy is a tale about counterespionage set during the Revolutionary War, with main character Harvey Birch, British loyalist who is in fact a George Washington's spy. The plot ranges back and forth over the neutral ground between the Continental and British armies with great haste and sweep. The action takes place so near to great events and the characters are all invested with something of the dusky light of heroes, while George Washington moves among them like an unsuspected god. This was the earliest American novel to win wide and permanent fame and may be said to have begun the type of romance which dominated U.S. fiction for 30 years. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Before embarking on his career as a writer, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman, which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, he also wrote numerous sea stories, and his best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

The Spy is a tale about counterespionage set during the Revolutionary War, with main character Harvey Birch, British loyalist who is in fact a George Washington's spy. The plot ranges back and forth over the neutral ground between the Continental and British armies with great haste and sweep. The action takes place so near to great events and the characters are all invested with something of the dusky light of heroes, while George Washington moves among them like an unsuspected god. This was the earliest American novel to win wide and permanent fame and may be said to have begun the type of romance which dominated U.S. fiction for 30 years. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Before embarking on his career as a writer, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman, which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, he also wrote numerous sea stories, and his best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

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This carefully crafted ebook: "THE SPY - A Tale of the Neutral Ground (Espionage Thriller Classic)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Spy is a tale about counterespionage set during the Revolutionary War, with main character Harvey Birch, British loyalist who is in fact a George Washington's spy. The plot ranges back and forth over the neutral ground between the Continental and British armies with great haste and sweep. The action takes place so near to great events and the characters are all invested with something of the dusky light of heroes, while George Washington moves among them like an unsuspected god. This was the earliest American novel to win wide and permanent fame and may be said to have begun the type of romance which dominated U.S. fiction for 30 years. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Before embarking on his career as a writer, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman, which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, he also wrote numerous sea stories, and his best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

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. The Spy was successful and began Cooper's reputation as a popular and important American writer. 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. 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. Years later, in 1831, Cooper gave credit for the book's success on the "love of country" among his American readers. 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". A review in the North American Review noted the book "laid the foundations of American romance". 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. 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. 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. (wikipedia.org)

A year after his imitative first novel Precaution (1820) enjoyed only modest success, James Fenimore Cooper penned The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, a Revolutionary War narrative initiating the American historical romance, a novel and a genre that quickly put to rest the British critic Sydney Smith's 1820 quip, "In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American novel?" Beginning with The Spy, everyone did. The novel excited readers with the perilous adventures of the spy (Harvey Birch, the Yankee peddler) and his contact Mr. Harper (George Washington appearing incognito), both surfacing repeatedly in various disguises and engaged in counterespionage (very clearly a parallel to the John Andre and Benedict Arnold stories) with their guerilla nemeses, the loyalist Cow-Boys and renegade Skinners. The Spy revealed the clash of loyalties within families between public and private duty to country and to self, and served as a microcosm of the new American world, staged in the "neutral ground" between opposing forces in Westchester, New York. William Gilmore Simms, Cooper's admirer and imitator, declared "The publication of The Spy ... was an event," while Boston's North American Review agreed, "the American Revolution is an admirable basis, on which to found fictions of the highest order of romantic interest." This fresh tale generated good American press for the young Cooper, and so set the stage for Cooper's career-long contributions to the development of the American novel. The editors provide a historical introduction identifying Cooper's sources, as well as detailed explanatory notes to enable readers fully to appreciate the geographical and historical settings in the novel. This scholarly edition, the eighteenth in "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper," presents an accurate text drawing upon eight texts, from the first edition (with two editorially revised reprintings soon following to satisfy public demand) through the heavily revised Bentley Standard Novels edition (1831) and the more lightly revised Putnam Author's edition (1849). The editors provide a full scholarly apparatus discussing their editorial choices, and the edition has been approved by scholarly peers in the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is particularly remembered as a novelist, who wrote numerous sea-stories as well as the historical romances known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, which many people consider his masterpiece. Other works include Precaution (1820), The Spy (1821), The Pioneers (1823), The Red Rover (1828), The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), The Notions of a Traveling Bachelor (1828), The Waterwitch (1830), The Bravo (1831), The Monikins (1835), The American Democrat (1835) and Homeward Bound (1839).

One of James Fenimore Cooper's earliest novels, 'The Spy' combines action and intrigue in a splendidly described setting immediately north of British-held New York City.During the American Revolution, many people lived in areas alternately controlled by Continental or British forces. Loyalties to one cause or the other divided households, but nobility (or corruption) was found in people wearing either uniform.Cooper tells the story as he claimed to have heard it...from someone who heard it firsthand. His craft is evident.