James Fenimore Cooper: Entrepreneur of the Self.

Alliston and Schirmeister suggest that contrary to the accepted view, and unlike any of his other entrepreneurial undertakings at this time, Cooper's venture with the whaling ship Union in the years 1819-23 was a financial success. They show that the dividends of this project allowed Cooper to underwrite the costs of publishing his first two novels, Precaution and The Spy, and that, in imaginative terms, the whaling venture helped to liberate Cooper's literary powers from beneath the weight of a troublesome family inheritance.