James Fenimore Cooper is chiefly known to posterity as the author of The Last of the Mohicans, focussing on the friendship between a Native American chief and a white hunter. Cooper himself acknowledged that it was his Leatherstocking Tales which were the most likely to endure of his work; yet this estimate understates Coopers significance as the most prolific and internationally-read American author of the first half of the nineteenth century. Fenimore Cooper developed a distinctive style well adapted to handling frontier, ...
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James Fenimore Cooper is chiefly known to posterity as the author of The Last of the Mohicans, focussing on the friendship between a Native American chief and a white hunter. Cooper himself acknowledged that it was his Leatherstocking Tales which were the most likely to endure of his work; yet this estimate understates Coopers significance as the most prolific and internationally-read American author of the first half of the nineteenth century. Fenimore Cooper developed a distinctive style well adapted to handling frontier, military and nautical romances, which won him great popularity and gave him entry to the leading figures in post-Napoleonic Europe. In consequence he also became one of the most sophisticated political and environmentalist thinkers of his time. His explicitly political writings and politically-involved novels won him both considerable influence and formidable social rejection. His environmental worries, perceptible in many of his works, anticipate todays concerns. Cooper was also a significant historian, and broke new literary ground in writing a biography of an ordinary sailor when such works were always concerned with the great and the good. The breadth and significance of his output remains widely under-recognised, and too many of his works hard to find. This edition of the Complete Works of Fenimore Cooper not only includes the well-known novels, but obscure early fictional works and the significant non-fictional works, including the naval histories and biographies, the pioneering biography Ned Myers, travel writing, and the political pamphlets which were of great importance in Coopers time. The contents of the volumes are as follows: Volume 1 (333 pp.): Precaution; Introduction to the Works by Dr. Bob Lawson-Peebles Volume 2 (335 pp.): The Spy Volu
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