The Spy

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)