AMBER SERIES · AETERNUS
1789–1851
The man who gave the American wilderness a voice
AMBER
The Deerslayer was the last of the five Leatherstocking novels Cooper wrote, yet it stands first in the life of Natty Bumppo. The aged creator returned to the youth of the man whom he had first imagined in old age and placed him once more beside the waters of Otsego Lake.
Explore the edition →Life & context
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was among the first American novelists to achieve major international fame and one of the principal creators of the historical frontier romance. Raised in Cooperstown, New York, amid the living memory of early settlement, and later trained by experience at sea and service in the United States Navy, he brought to fiction an unusual command of landscape, movement, seamanship, wilderness skill and historical conflict.
His breakthrough came with The Spy in 1821. Two years later The Pioneers introduced Natty Bumppo, the hunter later known as Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder and Leatherstocking. Cooper returned to the character across nearly two decades, ultimately creating five novels that follow Natty from youth in the forests of colonial New York to old age on the western prairie.
Few characters in American fiction have proved more durable.
Cooper’s style, plots and representation of the frontier inspired admiration, imitation, parody and fierce criticism throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Yet the central achievement survived every quarrel. Through Leatherstocking, Chingachgook, Uncas, Magua and the immense landscapes surrounding them, Cooper helped give the American wilderness a permanent place in world literature.
Portrait by John Wesley Jarvis, 1822.
The five Leatherstocking novels are presented in the chronological order of Natty Bumppo’s life rather than in the sequence of original publication.
This arrangement reveals the complete dramatic movement of the cycle:
from youth to age,
from forest to settlement,
from initiation to memory,
from the first war-path to the final trail.
The reader therefore encounters Leatherstocking not as Cooper’s first readers did, but as a single life unfolding across five acts.
Volume I, The Deerslayer, is forthcoming in two parts.
