James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (LOA #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie

The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic.

Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Coope...