The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [18]
3 Nina Baym disputes the whole notion that there was a unique American form, the romantic or the American Gothic style, and finds that America, in the antebellum period produced readers, reviewers, and authors similar to what prevailed in Britain during the period. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
4 Leslie Fiedler, “Introduction” to The Deerslayer, New York: Modern Library, 2002.
5 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of the Deerslayer,” in Joel Myerson, ed., Studies in the American Renaissance (1988), pp. 401-417.
6 Seven of the thirteen children lived into adulthood. Between 1813 and 1819. all of James Cooper’s older brothers died, leaving him with the responsibility of caring for a number of widows and orphaned children and for settling his father’s debt-ridden estate.
7 The story of this remarkable figure is told in Alan Taylor’s excellent William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (see “For Further Reading”), which also includes much valuable material on James Cooper’s early life.
8 Alan Taylor disputes the legend in William Cooper’s Town (pp. 363-370) . He argues that the attack, if it actually occurred as the legend suggests, did not bring about the pneumonia.
9 Cooper himself believed the Leatherstocking novels to be his best. In the preface (p. 6) he states, “If anything from the pen of the writer of these romances is at all to outlive himself, it is, unquestionably, the series of The Leatherstocking Tales.”
10 Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923; reprint: New York: Viking Press, 1961.
11 A boat might have pulled beneath “the branches of dark Rembrandt-looking hemlocks” (p. 29). “The scene was such as a poet or an artist would have delighted in, but it had no charm for Hurry Harry” (p. 47). It did have charm, however, for Deerslayer to whom the thought did occur.
12 For an interesting discussion of why Natty bequeaths the rifle to Hist in The Deerslayer, and in The Prairie selects Hard-Heart, the Pawnee Indian Chief, as the recipient of his belongings, see William Owen, “Natty Changes His Will: Legacies and Beneficiaries in The Deerslayer and The Prairie,” paper presented at the Cooper Panel of the 2000 Conference of the American Literature Association held in Long Beach, California, originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers no. 13, July 2000, pp. 7-12 (available on the James Fenimore Cooper Society Web site: www.oneonta.edu/external / cooper / artic1es.html).
—“What Terrors round him wait!
Amazement in his van, with Flight combined
And sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.”1
Thomas GRAY, The Bard, II.60-62
PREFACE TO THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES [1850]1
This series of Stories, which has obtained the name of The Leatherstocking Tales, has been written in a very desultory and inartificial manner. The order in which the several books appeared was essentially different from that in which they would have been presented to the world had the regular course of their incidents been consulted. In The Pioneers, the first of the series written, the Leatherstocking is represented as already old, and driven from his early haunts in the forest by the sound of the axe and the smoke of the settler. The Last of the Mohicans, the next book in the order of publication, carried the readers back to a much earlier period in the history of our hero, representing him as middle-aged, and in the fullest vigor of manhood. In The Prairie, his career terminates, and he is laid in his grave. There, it was originally the intention to leave him, in the expectation that, as in the case