James Fenimore Cooper (of The Last of the Mohicans fame) is great fun. Yes, fun and romance and adventure and excitement. He is a bit out of fashion, like black-and-white movies from the thirties, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't be missing a great experience by reading him.
Granted, there are dated turns of phrase, and he is a master of the forever-long sentence like Henry James and Gertrude Stein, but these are small prices to pay for adventures in the wilderness. That wilderness is anything west of the Hudson River and north of Albany. The country was still small and its corners were not rounded into suburbs and federal highways.
These days Cooper is relegated often to being seen as the writer behind Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, a fine movie. Reading his stories of la longue carabine, as the Indians of the French called him, and "pathfinder" to the colonists, is a struggle through some muddiness at first; and then the adventures take over, the sentences make sense even though they often run on, and the scenes of battle and the wilderness are trips of their own. These were planned as adventures, and adventures they are.
I am not competent to review Cooper. He is an American classic and the stuff of academic discussions and classes, criticism, and scholarship. This is a "commentary," or perhaps just a reminder that all classics are not "school books." Read him for fun and for a sense of the history of the country when it was young and the world was simpler.
Perhaps I love the Leatherstocking Tales with Natty Bumppo (Pathfinder) because the rules of the game were, like the first Superman, a simple goodness of spirit of which we are today losing so rapidly in the world. Natty Bumppo wasn't just a prince of the virgin continent; his code of conduct was definite—faithful, moral, fearless—and he was an example of a "just minded and pure man might be."
Article comments
1 - DrPat
Great review of a well-regarded classic, Alpha! I remember discovering the Leatherstocking Tales in my dad's library, and falling in love with them long before I knew they would be required reading someday. (I was captured by Ivanhoe in the same way, baffling my fourth-grade teacher, who expected a book report featuring Andy Hardy or Tom Swift, and got Coeur-de-Lion instead!)
2 - Nancy
These lovely books belong to a period when there was more leisure & time for description, together with a tolerance for moral exposition. It's really amazing to read them & realize he's talking about places like modern-day Poughkeepsie!
3 - Pat Cummings
This book review has been selected for Advance.net. You’ll be able to find this and other Blog Critics reviews at such places as Cleveland.com’s Book Reviews column.
4 - Temple Stark
May I call you A?
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Thank you for the writing.
5 - Bliffle
"Read him for fun and for a sense of the history of the country when it was young and the world was simpler."
Excellent reading, especially for young boys. Should be on every young mans bookshelf, along with Stevensons classics like "Treasure Island", "Inland Voyage" and "Travels with a Donkey".
A meritorious young woman would do well to examine a prospective suitors bookshelf to assure that he has had the benefit of these tutors of manhood.