James Fenimore Cooper

The tale of a Mohican brave's struggle to protect two English girls from an evil Huron. Illustrated with maps and drawings depicting the period.

The Pathfinder (1840), Cooper's most picturesque novel and the fourth of the five Leatherstocking Tales, is a naval story set on the Great Lakes of the 1750s. Fashioned from Cooper's own experience as a midshipman on Lake Ontario in 1808-09, the novel revives Natty Bumpo (who had died in The Prairie), and illuminates Cooper's interest in American history with his concern for social development.

Taking place just a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, The Prairie follows Ishmael and Esther Bush as they travel west from the Mississippi River with their fourteen children, Ellen Wade, a doctor, and Esther's brother. While searching for a place to camp, the group meets Natty Bumppo, a legendary man now in his late eighties. Referred to as "the trapper" Natty helps the family settle somewhere safe. Later, as he roams through the forest, he...

While guiding a small party of English settlers to the protection of a fort during the French and Indian War, Hawkeye, a frontier scout, and his two Indian friends, the remaining braves of the Mohican tribe, struggle against the evils of Uncas who desires a white maiden for his wife.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. A provocative exposé on American politics, The American Democrat will amuse, shock, and offend contemporary readers-just as it did when originally published in 1835. It depicts a country teetering on the edge of sacrificing the principles of the American Revolution on the altar of parochial interests. In a startling twist on this all-too-familiar theme, however,...

Cooper's first major success, The Spy is also his first book set in the period of the American War of Independence. The story starts in 1870, with the household of Mr. Wharton and his daughters visited by the three men: the mysterious Mr. Harper, an American loyalist; Captain Henry Wharton, the son of the house and an officer in the British Army; and Mr. Harvey Birch, suspected of being a British spy. The differing loyalties of these men are reflected...

Published in 1850, this was Cooper's final novel-and America's first courtroom drama. When innocent Mary Monson is accused of murder, she refuses to clear her name, insisting on a jury trial. Cooper, who opposed the trial-by-jury system, mounts his soapbox to rail against the system's susceptibility to corruption, among other flaws.