James Fenimore Cooper

The tale of a Mohican brave's struggle to protect two English girls from an evil Huron

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...

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....

The Bravo (1831) takes place in early eighteenth-century Venice, when the "Serene Republic" had lost much of its glory, leaving its oligarchs struggling to hold on to their family wealth by manipulating the government and people through secret councils and a figure-head doge. In 1844, Cooper called it "in spirit, the most American book I ever wrote" because of its depiction of the masses duped by demagoguery and the attempts of Congress to rein in...

The first book in Cooper's Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy vividly captures "old New York" from the vantage point of one of its earliest families of settlers. This romance follows Cornelius "Corny" Littlepage as he travels from his home on Long Island Sound to nascent Manhattan and into the wilds of the territory, all along sharing his observations of country versus city.

The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen and Abiram slowly making their way across the virgin prairies of the Midwest looking for a homestead, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, and during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They meet Natty Bumppo, the trapper, who has left his home in New York state to find a place where he cannot hear the sound of people cutting down the forests.