I sometimes get the impression that my entire life is a thinly disguised emulation of fiction

James Fenimore Cooper created the essential American hero of innumerable novels, stories, and films: the socially marginal and rootless loner operating in a violent no-man's-land beyond the rule of law but guided by his own superior code of justice. 

Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic