Paul Fenimore Cooper

Paul Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1899 – January 20, 1970) was an American author of children's books and non-fiction, some based on his own travels. His first book was a translation of Albanian folk tales.

Life

Paul Fenimore Cooper was born in Albany, New York in 1899, the son of James Fenimore Cooper (1858–1938) and Susan Linn (Sage) Cooper (1866–1933). Her brother Henry M. Sage (1868–1933) became a state senator. Paul was a great-grandson of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) and a 2xgreat-grandson of William Cooper (1754–1809), the founder of Cooperstown, New York. Cooper was also distantly related 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.^[1]

He married Marion Erskine. Their son Paul Fenimore Cooper Jr. became a physicist and Arctic explorer; he was elected a Fellow of the Arctic Society in 1954.

Cooper's books included Tricks of Women and Other Albanian Tales (1928), a translation of folk tales; Tal: His Marvelous Adventures with Noom-Zor-Noom (1929), a children's book about an orphan and the fantastical adventures he encounters on a quest to the land of Troom; Island of the Lost (1961), a non-fiction account of the Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, told within a biography of King William Island, the noted Eskimo; and Dindle (1964), a children's book about a dwarf who saves a kingdom from a dragon. Tal has had enduring popularity; it was reprinted in new editions in 1957 and 2001.

References

• Purple House Press
• Paul Cooper Obituary reprinted at JSTOR
• The Cooper Genealogy
• Sage genealogy, Gen Forum