Back James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales (boxed set)

James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales (boxed set)

The Pioneers | The Last of the Mohicans | The Prairie | The Pathfinder | The Deerslayer

Edited by Blake Nevius

“To read Cooper is to be elevated. This is in part because he looked to nature not for self-therapy, as did so many of his contemporaries, but for an emblem of his nation’s future, from which he considered his personal fate to be inextricable. In the fictions that have now taken their proper place in The Library of America, Cooper recorded his own disillusionment with a society where privilege was both universally scorned and universally desired. Yet he always wrote about his country with what Fiedler calls ‘The ferocity of baffled love.’”—Andrew Delbanco, The New Republic

Overview

Overview

Interviews John Logan on James Fenimore Cooper: “Dive in and get reading”
July 19, 2019

Interviews James Fenimore Cooper reveals “deeply hidden truths” about the American Revolution
December 14, 2018

The Moviegoer Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans
October 6, 2016

The definitive edition of Cooper’s great epic of the American frontier, now in a dramatic boxed set. Here, presented in their order of composition and in the most authoritative texts available, are all five classic novels: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.

Leatherstocking, or Natty Bumppo, first appears in The Pioneers 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. The Last of the Mohicans 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 a wave of terror through the English settlements. The Prairie 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.

American readers couldn’t get enough of the Leatherstocking saga and, fourteen years after he published The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea. 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—and, for the first time, Natty falls in love. The Deerslayer brings the saga full circle and follows the young Leatherstocking on his first warpath. Honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, Natty emerges as Cooper’s noblest figure of the American frontier.

Each volume is also available separately, in print and e-book editions.

Blake Nevius (1916–1994), volume editor, was professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the author of numerous studies of American writers, including Cooper, Edith Wharton, and Sinclair Lewis.

Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume One is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from Ronald P. Stanton for his daughter Hedi Stanton and his son Philip Stanton.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume Two is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from J. Lawrence and Rose Hughes in memory of John C. Hughes.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-154-1 2398 pages

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