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James Fenimore Cooper: The Complete Works
James Fenimore Cooper The Complete Works Author:James Fenimore Cooper James Fenimore Cooper is chiefly known to posterity as the author of The Last of the Mohicans, focussing on the friendship between a Native American chief and a white hunter. Cooper himself acknowledged that it was his 'Leatherstocking Tales' which were the most likely to endure of his work; yet this estimate understates Cooper s significance as... more » the most prolific and internationally-read American author of the first half of the nineteenth century. Fenimore Cooper developed a distinctive style well adapted to handling frontier, military and nautical romances, which won him great popularity and gave him entry to the leading figures in post-Napoleonic Europe. In consequence he also became one of the most sophisticated political and environmentalist thinkers of his time. His explicitly political writings and politically-involved novels won him both considerable influence and formidable social rejection. His environmental worries, perceptible in many of his works, anticipate today s concerns. Cooper was also a significant historian, and broke new literary ground in writing a biography of an ordinary sailor when such works were always concerned with the 'great and the good'. The breadth and significance of his output remains widely under-recognised, and too many of his works hard to find. This edition of the Complete Works of Fenimore Cooper not only includes the well-known novels, but obscure early fictional works and the significant non-fictional works, including the naval histories and biographies, the pioneering biography Ned Myers, travel writing, and the political pamphlets which were of great importance in Cooper's time.« less