Cooper's quote

I think that Cooper is right when he says that American writers had nothing here to draw on. Every author brings his or her previous experience with them when they sit down to write something. That person has read literature from other authors and uses the ideas he learns in his or her own writing. These can include stylistic forms, as well as ideas to influence their own writing. Every author in the early part of the 19th Century had obviously read what was then considered to be the important literature for their time. In doing so, an author is shaped by others ideas. Unfortunately, many of those authors were probably not from American, but Britian, so their opinions were insprired by authors who really had no idea of what was actually going on in the U.S. So authors who wrote things that seemed original or cutting edge were considered non-conformists. But they were really just trying to tell their stories from an American perspective.