The ten original essays in this collection, all by internationally known Cooper scholars, offer fresh and original insights into the five Leather-Stocking Tales: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Treating the novels individually or commenting on the series as a whole, the contributors address such issues as race, gender, and ethnicity in Cooper’s world and their relationship to ours, as well as scholarly responses to the politics and economics of the early Republic and discussions of the nature of American frontier society in the first half of the nineteenth century.

More specifically, the essays treat race-mixing and the Africanist presence in the Leather-Stocking Tales; Cooper’s role as popular novelist; virtue ethics, literature, and life; Cooper’s portrait of the American man of leisure; the presence of the grotesque in his fiction; and the marketing context of Cooper’s “sixth” Leather-Stocking Tale.

Intended to be used as a companion to a study of Cooper and his Leather-Stocking novels, this collection of lively, informative, and readable essays will encourage serious contemporary discussion of America’s first successful—and at one time most popular—novelist.

Jeffrey Walker is the author of a critical study on the Revolutionary War poet and traitor Benjamin Church and co-editor of the first scholarly edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1821 novel The Spy. He is also the co-editor of a new annual, Literature in the Early American Republic, and is completing an edition of Cooper’s unpublished letters. A professor of English at Oklahoma State University, he has served as a Fulbright lecturer in Norway and Belgium.