Definitive literary biographies straddle a substantial fault line. On one hand they speak to a professional audience: scholars and critics in search of data that will enable interpretation. On the other, they address more general readers interested in the trajectory of an author’s life and the relationship between biography and literary achievement. Balance is not easily achieved. Too little detail undercuts scholarly ambition; too much drowns the casual reader in a floodtide of minutiae.

Wayne Franklin, the author of “James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years” (Yale University Press, 752 pages, $40), approaches that challenge with the advantage of a clean slate. Alone among major American writers, Cooper has never been the subject of a full-dress biography. During his lifetime Cooper guarded his privacy, and for a century following his death in 1851, his family sharply limited access to his papers. That prohibition was finally lifted with the naming of James Franklin Beard as Cooper’s literary executor. In the 1960s Beard produced a scholarly edition of Cooper’s journals and launched a new edition of his writings, but at the time of his death in 1989, he had made little progress on the biography.

Mr. Franklin’s scholarly mandate, then, is clear: Marshal a welter of material long denied to Cooper scholars, introduce new information, amend long-held misconceptions about the novelist’s life and times. On this score, Mr. Franklin succeeds brilliantly. His account of Cooper’s life from his birth in 1789 until his departure for Europe in 1836 is scrupulously researched and copiously footnoted. Most significantly, Mr. Franklin sorts through the voluminous record of real estate transactions, lawsuits, mortgages, and bankruptcies that played a determinant role in Cooper’s unlikely decision to become a novelist.

Mr. Franklin’s contextual renderings are similarly comprehensive. We learn a great deal indeed about the U.S. Navy before and during the War of 1812, agricultural development in Cooperstown and its environs, undergraduate life at Yale in the first decade of the 19th century, New York political rivalries in the era of De Witt Clinton, familial and social networks in Westchester County, and the early stirrings of Manhattan literary life.

As impressively, Mr. Franklin shapes this exhaustive catalog of detail into a compelling narrative. He does so primarily by casting Cooper’s experience in representative terms. Cooper’s father, William, the subject of Alan Taylor’s 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, serves as an emblem of the rough-and-tumble early republic, a period of unrestrained expansion and self-invention. Cooper, in turn, stands for the succeeding generation, one charged with the burden of both their fathers’ achievements and failings. Cooper’s struggles to order the chaos of his father’s crumbling financial empire, his attempts to grasp the dynamics of the democratic experiment, and his efforts to craft a distinctive American literary voice tell the larger story of an emergent culture.

Beyond setting the biographical record straight, and doing so in an accessible manner, Mr. Franklin confronts an additional challenge unique to Cooper. Unlike biographers of Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, and other major figures of the American canon, Mr. Franklin must serve as an apologist for his subject. Cooper’s significance is not in question. The first American novelist to win international fame, the inventor of the sea and the wilderness novels, and the creator of “The Leatherstocking Tales” and its iconic characters Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Cooper is a part of our national furnishings. But if his cultural centrality is beyond dispute, his literary status is far less secure. Overborne by the prolixity of his style and the creaking mechanisms of his plots, Cooper’s novels are unread even in university courses devoted to antebellum American writing.

As his biographer, it falls to Mr. Franklin to explain why Cooper matters, how his work is essential to an understanding of our national experience. One thrust of that defense is unpersuasive. Mr. Franklin attributes the failings of Cooper’s style to the haphazard production of American novels in his day and to the financial pressures that forced him to write too rapidly. Certainly more careful editing and revision would have reduced some of the infelicities of Cooper’s prose, but the problem is deeper than that. As Joseph Conrad noted, Cooper wrote “before the great American language was born.” His voice is of another age; appreciating its tenor requires work.

A second thrust is far more productive and provides a convincing rationale for making that effort. It proceeds from Mr. Franklin’s view of Cooper’s representative status, the driving impulse of the biography’s narrative. Mr. Franklin argues that Cooper is an heir, par excellence, of the market revolution that dramatically altered American life in the decades after the War of 1812. The reopening of European markets after that conflict overheated consumer demand long suppressed by the embargoes of the Napoleonic Wars. In a climate of rampant speculation, farmers, merchants, and nascent industrialists alike overextended their credit and fell into ruinous debt. Economic panics and social instabilities were the order of the day. A culture whose verities were rooted in property fell victim to the rising tide of commodification. For Cooper and his generation the center no longer held, all things solid melted into air.

The darkness of Cooper’s later writing has its origins in that uncertainty. His indictment of American mendacity, of the lawyers, politicians, and journalists who dominated social discourse, and of the pervasive abandonment of the foundational principles of the republic are deeply felt and powerfully expressed. Similar chords echo, of course, in Melville’s “Bartleby,” Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Thoreau’s “Walden,” and everything Poe wrote. But in Cooper’s early work we watch that resistance take shape; we hear its initial strains. Mr. Franklin helps us to recognize those emergent tones, and consequently, to understand why Cooper merits our attention.

Mr. Kelly is President of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of “Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and The Leatherstocking Tales.”