James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the adventures and exploits of independent frontiersman Natty Bumppo, were tremendously popular in the antebellum era and helped to define both American literary culture and the emerging nation's self-image. There were five tales in all: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). From the beginning, Cooper's works met with success, and he was hailed as America's first major author. Contemporary readers found in the Leatherstocking Tales both reassurance that American writers could produce significant literary work and an inspiring patriotic portrayal of the United States. Many of Cooper's characters went on to become stock figures or stereotypes of American popular culture, such as the tragically noble Indian and the loyal slave. However, it was the rugged, manly, and lawless Natty Bumppo, or "Leatherstocking," who truly captured the public imagination. Cooper romanticized the frontier as a place of wild adventure where Americans lived beyond the reach of corrupt, restrictive society and tested themselves against nature. By writing on such themes, he helped overcome an earlier American bias against novels as feminine and trivial. He also began a tradition of depicting the country's unsettled lands as places of purity, honor, and integrity, and hence of identifying the frontier as a key component of American identity. Despite this celebration of rugged individualism, later commentators have pointed out the ambiguity of Cooper's message. While he clearly admired the colorful lives of men like Leatherstocking, Cooper's novels also insisted that such radical independence would have to give way to social cooperation and the rule of law if America was to survive and prosper. Ultimately, the Leatherstocking Tales taught that hard-fought American liberty could only be sustained if the best qualities of the frontiersman were brought into the mainstream of society.
Bibliography
Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 1950.
Taylor, Alan. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. New York: Knopf, 1995.
