The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. When Natty Bumppo started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset at the novel's close, one early reader said, "I longed to go with him." The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is a pure unabashed narrative of adventure. It looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash their Mingo allies on a wave of terror through the English settlements. The Prairie (1827) takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice that reflects Cooper's historical dialectic of culture and nature, of the American nation and the American continent. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

When Cooper's most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, "I longed to go with him." American readers couldn't get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in two Library of America volumes) and, fourteen years after he portrayed the death of Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1841). During the Seven Years War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father's station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush. Here, for the first time, he falls in love with a woman, before Cooper manages bring off Leatherstocking's most poignant, and perhaps his most revealing, escape. The Deerslayer (1842) brings the saga full circle and follows the young Natty on his first warpath. Instinctively gifted in the arts of the forest, pious in his respect for the unspoiled wilderness on which he loves to gaze, honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, the young Leatherstocking emerges as Cooper's noblest figure of the American frontier. Enacting a rite of passage both for its hero and for the culture he comes to represent, this last book in the series glows with a timelessness that readers everywhere will find enchanting. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo, known by European settlers as "Leatherstocking" and "The Pathfinder", and by the Native Americans as "Deerslayer" and "Hawkeye". Natty Bumppo is a resourceful Anglo-American woodsman raised in part by Native Americans, who later becomes a fearless warrior skilled in many weapons, chiefly the long rifle. His constant companion is his "brother" Chingachgook, Mohican chief, who happens to be the actual last of the Mohicans. The stories take place on the rapidly advancing frontier of New York State and focus on the evolution of the wilderness into a civilized European-American community. Table of Contents: The Deerslayer: The First Warpath The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Before embarking on his career as a writer, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy, which greatly influenced many of his novels. The novel that launched his career was The Spy and he wrote numerous sea stories. His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

This carefully crafted ebook: "LEATHERSTOCKING TALES – Complete Series: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers & The Prairie (Illustrated)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo, known by European settlers as "Leatherstocking” and "The Pathfinder”, and by the Native Americans as "Deerslayer” and "Hawkeye”. Natty Bumppo is a resourceful Anglo-American woodsman raised in part by Native Americans, who later becomes a fearless warrior skilled in many weapons, chiefly the long rifle. His constant companion is his "brother" Chingachgook, Mohican chief, who happens to be the actual last of the Mohicans. The stories take place on the rapidly advancing frontier of New York State and focus on the evolution of the wilderness into a civilized European-American community. Table of Contents: The Deerslayer: The First Warpath The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Before embarking on his career as a writer, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy, which greatly influenced many of his novels. The novel that launched his career was The Spy and he wrote numerous sea stories. His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook, bring alive the early 1700's when Americans, French, and Huron were fighting for the vast, uncharted wilderness.

Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook, bring alive the early 1700's when Americans, French, and Huron were fighting for the vast, uncharted wilderness.

James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy are two of the most celebrated and influential writers of the American West. Both have written powerful narratives that focus on the disappearance of the nineteenth century frontier, and both show an interest in the dramatic ways in which the frontier gave shape to American culture. But is it possible that the kinship between these two writers extends beyond simply sharing an interest in this subject? Teasing out the implications of the recurrent allusions to Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales in the pages of McCarthy’s Southwestern novels, this book finds Cooper and McCarthy engaged in a complex legal and ethical dialogue despite the centuries that separate their lives and their work. The result of their dialogue is a provocative, nuanced analysis of the effects of the frontier on the American justice system – and, for both writers, an expression of alarm at the violation of the principles upon which the system was established.

James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales, published between 1823 and 1841, are generally regarded as America's first major works of fiction. Here, Geoffrey Rans provides not simply a new reading of the five novels that comprise the series but also a new way of reading them. Rans analyzes each of the five novels (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer) in the order in which they were originally composed, an achronological sequence in terms of the stories they tell. As events in early written novels interact with those in later ones, the reader is compelled to construct political meanings different from Cooper's ideological preferences. This approach effectively precludes reading these works as Natty Bumppo's life story, or as an aspect of Cooper's. Rans presents the series as a text that faithfully reproduces the conflicts Cooper faced, both at the time when he wrote the novels and in the history that the novels contemplate. Cooper emerges as a composer of richly problematical texts for which no aesthetic resolution is possible and in which every idealization, political or poetic, is relentlessly subjected to the gaze of historical reality. The tension between potential and practice, which is apparent in the final two volumes of the tales, is present, Rans contends, from the inception of the series. Because the problems of racism and greed that Cooper addresses remained as unresolved for us as for him, Rans concludes that this reading of the Leather-Stocking tales reinforces both Cooper's central canonical position and his value as an articulator of political conflict. Originally published in 1991. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.