James Fenimore Cooper

Natty Bumppo, now on the threshold of old age, finds his way of life challenged as the land he has roamed becomes private property and the laws of man supplant the laws of nature.

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...

An exciting tale of nautical adventure on the waters of colonial New York Harbor. Chiefly set on the waters and islands of New York Harbor in the early years of the 1700s, James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Water-Witch (1830) paints a vivid picture of life in the little colonial port. It was familiar territory for Cooper, who a century later had served as a junior officer on board an eighteen-gun sloop-of-war stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That...

Published in 1850, this was Cooper's final novel-and America's first courtroom drama. When innocent Mary Monson is accused of murder, she refuses to clear her name, insisting on a jury trial. Cooper, who opposed the trial-by-jury system, mounts his soapbox to rail against the system's susceptibility to corruption, among other flaws.

Cooper's first major success, The Spy is also his first book set in the period of the American War of Independence. The story starts in 1870, with the household of Mr. Wharton and his daughters visited by the three men: the mysterious Mr. Harper, an American loyalist; Captain Henry Wharton, the son of the house and an officer in the British Army; and Mr. Harvey Birch, suspected of being a British spy. The differing loyalties of these men are reflected...