The Chainbearer
(September 2020)
Or, The Littlepage Manuscripts James Fenimore Cooper - Author Lance Schachterle - Editor James P. Elliott - Editor Lance Schachterle - Historical introduction Wesley T. Mott - Historical introduction John P. McWilliams - Historical introduction Lance Schachterle - Explanatory notes
Cooper’s The Chainbearer presents an exciting narrative that interrogates issues of what it means to own land. The novel examines the claims of ownership of wilderness land among Native Americans, New England squatters, and the old New York families with legal deeds.
In 1845 and 1846, James Fenimore Cooper published The Littlepage Manuscripts, a trilogy reflec...(Read More)
The Spy
(February 2020)
A Tale of the Neutral Ground James Fenimore Cooper - Author James P. Elliott - Historical introduction James H. Pickering - Annotator James P. Elliott - Text established by Lance Schachterle - Text established by Jeffrey Walker - Text established by
An exciting Revolutionary War tale of double agents and counterespionage in New York State in 1780.
A year after his imitative first novel Precaution (1820) enjoyed only modest success, James Fenimore Cooper penned The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, a Revolutionary War narrative initiating the American historical romance, a novel and a genre that quickly put to rest the British critic Sydney Smith’s 1820 ...(Read More)
Prairie, The: A Tale
(June 1985)
James Fenimore Cooper - Author James P. Elliott - Historical introduction and notes
In the spring of 1826, soon after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper immersed himself in The Prairie. In taking Natty Bumppo from his beloved forests of New York state to the Great American Plains, Cooper was in part fulfilling his own prophecy at the end of The Pioneers. Though he was certainly recalling the periodic westward removals of Daniel Boone, one of the prototypes of Natty Bumppo, he was...(Read More)
Gleanings in Europe
(June 1981)
England James Fenimore Cooper - Author Donald A. Ringe - Historical introduction and notes Kenneth W. Staggs - Historical introduction, notes, and text James P. Elliott - Text established by Robert D. Madison - Text established by
A contemporaneous reviewer called James Fenimore Cooper's England "unquestionably the most searching and thoughtful, not TO say philosophical of any" of the books "published by an American on England. "Another cited with approval the "potent causticity" with which a fellow reviewer "develope[d] the gangrene of the author's mind in its most foul and diseased state."
Gleanings in Europe
(June 1980)
Switzerland James Fenimore Cooper - Author Kenneth W. Staggs - Text established by James P. Elliott - Text established by Robert E. Spiller - Historical introduction and text James Franklin Beard - Historical introduction and text
In the summer of 1828 James Fenimore Cooper, his wife, and their five children set out from Paris for Switzerland, and Cooper wrote that he experienced a "glorious anticipation," for "a common-place converse with men was about to give place to a sublime communion with Nature."
Sketches of Switzerland, the book which describes this experience and which is republished here for the first time in the United States since its original issue ...(Read More)
