James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born in Burlington, New
Jersey, and his family moved to Cooperstown, New York, while he was
still an infant. He attended Yale College until he was expelled for
bad behavior. He served in the U.S. Navy, resigning in 1811 to get
married. With his story The Pilot (1823), Cooper set the style for
a new genre of sea fiction. His most famous novels are the
Leather-Stocking Tales including The Pioneers (1823), The Last of
the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and
The Deerslayer (1841), featuring the quintessential American hero
Natty Bumppo. Cooper, a keen social critic, wrote several
well-regarded naval histories.
Richard Hutson is an associate professor of English and director of
the American Studies Program at the University of California,
Berkeley. His teaching and writing have been primarily on American
popular culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
especially on the American West.
Hugh C. MacDougall, a graduate of Harvard, Columbia Law School and
Columbia School of International Affairs, served in the State
Department for twenty-eight years, including postings in tropical
Africa, Brazil, and Burma. He is a founder of the James Fenimore
Cooper Society, and has presented many papers on Cooper and his
writings.
“In his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo
[Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society…A stark human
relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than
property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than
Love.”—D. H. Lawrence
“The Last of the Mohicans raises again the question of the efficacy
of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual
men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent
than now.”—James Franklin Beard
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