James Fenimore Cooper

Presents an illustrated edition of the American classic in which Hawkeye, a scout, and his Mohican companions, Chigachgook and Uncas, lead a small band of Americans fleeing from the British and their Indian allies during the French and Indian War.

Set in 1793 and 1794, The Pioneers tracks the changes of a small town called Templeton, built on the advancing frontier of New York. Natty Bumppo, a hero raised by Native Americans, lives in a cabin, secluded in a forest near Templeton. As the Christmas Eve snow falls, Natty, more commonly known as Leatherstocking, embarks on a tense hunt for a deer. As he tracks the deer down, he runs into Judge Marmaduke Temple, the man who founded the town of Temple....

This book is the fourth novel Cooper wrote featuring Natty Bumppo, his fictitious frontier hero. "The Pathfinder" is the third chronological episode of the "Leatherstocking Tales." The inland sea of the title refers to Lake Ontario.

An exciting Revolutionary War tale of double agents and counterespionage in New York State in 1780. A year after his imitative first novel Precaution (1820) enjoyed only modest success, James Fenimore Cooper penned The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, a Revolutionary War narrative initiating the American historical romance, a novel and a genre that quickly put to rest the British critic Sydney Smith's 1820 quip, "In the four corners of the globe,...

An exciting tale of nautical adventure on the waters of colonial New York Harbor. Chiefly set on the waters and islands of New York Harbor in the early years of the 1700s, James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Water-Witch (1830) paints a vivid picture of life in the little colonial port. It was familiar territory for Cooper, who a century later had served as a junior officer on board an eighteen-gun sloop-of-war stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That...

Cooper's The Chainbearer presents an exciting narrative that interrogates issues of what it means to own land. The novel examines the claims of ownership of wilderness land among Native Americans, New England squatters, and the old New York families with legal deeds. In 1845 and 1846, James Fenimore Cooper published The Littlepage Manuscripts, a trilogy reflecting on the anti-rent movement among small farmers leasing parcels in the Hudson Valley...

Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, now on the threshold of old age finds his way of life challenged as the land he has roamed becomes private property, and the laws of man supplant the laws of nature.

It has been said that Precaution, James Fenimore Cooper's first novel, was written as the result of a wager Cooper made with his wife. A novel of English society, manners, and morals, Precaution imitates the works of Jane Austen and its intriguing style sets it apart from Cooper's subsequent fiction.

The Last of the Mohicans is the second book in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy, and remains his best-known work. It is a historical novel set in the French and Indian war in New York, and centers around the massacre of surrendered Anglo-American troops. The two daughters of the British commander are kidnapped, but rescued by the last two Mohicans. The title comes from a quote by Tamanend:'I have lived to see the last warrior of the wise race...

Inspired by a trip to Europe where Cooper traveled, this novel is set in Switzerland and largely focuses on political themes, especially the tension between the social elite and other classes.