fenimore cooper

The Last of the Mohicans - a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, an American writer of the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances depicting frontier and Native American life created a unique form of American literature. The novel is set primarily in the area of Lake George, New York, detailing the transport of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, Alice and Cora, to a safe destination...

Inspired by accusations of venality leveled at the men who captured Major Andre (Benedict Arnold’s co-conspirator, executed for espionage in 1780), Cooper’s novel centers on Harry Birch, a common man wrongly suspected by well-born Patriots of being a spy for the British. Even George Washington, who supports Birch, misreads the man, and when Washington offers him payment for information vital to the...

In The Pilot (1824), James Fenimore Cooper invented a new literary genre: the sea novel. Bold, vigorous, original, it is a tale of high adventure that vividly captures the majesty and power of the seafaring life. Cooper drew on his direct knowledge of ships and sailors to present a truer picture of life on the sea than had ever before achieved in literature. As a boy of seventeen he had experienced...

The Deerslayer - a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, an American writer of the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances depicting frontier and Native American life created a unique form of American literature. This novel introduces Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer": a young frontiersman in early 18th-century New York, who objects to the practice of taking scalps, on the grounds that every...