Vigorous, self-reliant, amazingly resourceful, and moral, Natty Bumppo is the prototype of the Western hero. A faultless arbiter of wilderness justice, he hates middle-class hypocrisy. But he finds his love divided between the woman he has pledged to protect on a treacherous journey and the untouched forest that sustains him in his beliefs. A fast-paced narrative full of adventure and majestic descriptions of early frontier life, Indian raiders, and...

Natty Bumppo, a young white hunter brought up in the Delaware Indian tribe, has to defend settlers before returning to the Iroquois who have allowed him parole.

The Deerslayer is the last-written of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, but the first in the development of the hero, Natty Bumppo. Here Cooper returns Leatherstocking to his youth and to a pristine wilderness. Natty was brought up among the Delaware Indians, engaged in warfare against the Hurons. He helps defend the family of Tom Hutter, a settler, from attack. Judith, a girl of noble birth loves Natty and begs him not to return to the Iroquois, but...

The Sea Lions (1849) is the twelfth and last of Cooper's sea novels, a genre he largely invented. Drawing upon memories from nearly three decades earlier of his own ventures in whaling and his reviews of accounts of exploring and hunting in cold seas, Cooper fashioned an exciting tale of two small vessels capturing seals near the Antarctic Circle. When the sealers are trapped by the ice and forced to winter over in extreme conditions, Cooper's hero...

The Prairie marks the final chapter in James Fenimore Cooper’s great saga of American frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Though nearly ninety in 1804, Bumppo, now on the Great Plains, is still a competent frontiersman and trapper. Once more he is drawn into conflict with society in the form of an emigrant party led by the surly Ishmael Bush and his miscreant brother-in-law, Abiram White. And once again, this great man of nature is called upon to exhibit...

Cooper's first choice of career had been the U.S. Navy, in which he served as a midshipman from 1808 to 1810. In 1823, Cooper began writing The Pilot, which he saw as a sea novel that seamen would appreciate for its fidelity and yet one that landsmen could understand. Cooper's poetic power is reserved for the sea, which is no backdrop but a separate world with forces and laws of its own. The individuation of the ships, particularly the personification...

Cooper's first choice of career had been the U.S. Navy, in which he served as a midshipman from 1808 to 1810. In 1823, Cooper began writing The Pilot, which he saw as a sea novel that seamen would appreciate for its fidelity and yet one that landsmen could understand. Cooper's poetic power is reserved for the sea, which is no backdrop but a separate world with forces and laws of its own. The individuation of the ships, particularly the personification...

A historical adventure reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley romances, Cooper's novel centers on Harvey Birch, a common man wrongly suspected of being a spy for the British.