Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.

Henry Spotswood Fenimore Cooper (November 24, 1933 – January 31, 2016) was a writer and local environmentalist. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, predominantly covering NASA's space program. Cooper also wrote eight books about space exploration throughout his lifetime. He was a noted chronicler of events at the Century Association, a private club in New York City. Early life Cooper was born on November 24, 1933, in New York City. His parents were Henry Sage Fenimore Cooper, a surgeon at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, and Katherine Lemoine Guy. He was the great-great-grandson of writer James Fenimore Cooper and sixth generation descendant of William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, New York. He had a brother, James Fenimore Cooper IV, and two sisters, Susan and Katherine. James died in 2014 and his sisters died within the year prior to that. Cooper spent summers throughout his childhood and later life in Cooperstown, and grew up swimming in Otsego Lake and in the surrounding forest and fields. Cooper attributed his interest in science writing to elementary school, where he read a copy of From the Earth to the Moon, an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. From ages 14 to 22, Cooper worked on his family's farm in the town. Henry S. F. Cooper attended the Buckley School in New York City and Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts. He subsequently attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English in 1956. During his stay at Yale, Cooper was a frequent writer for the Yale Daily News, and wrote the column "Sound and Fury". At Yale in 1955, Cooper and David P. Calleo anonymously wrote Inside Eli, or alternatively How to get on at Yale, which had sketches of Yale organizations, activities, and sports; it is currently held by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The book or pamphlet was written comically, described as resembling the works of Evelyn Waugh.