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

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.

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.