The French & Indian War, or the Seven Years' War
I have always been drawn to the first world war, the one that began in a remote glen in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1754 and by its end changed the look of the world in 1763. It sets up the American War of Independence, the decades of war between Britain and France -- in many ways, the modern age itself. For twenty years I attended as a vendor the annual seminar of the Braddock Road Preservation Association, and it educated and entertained me with some of the best scholars in the field. On this page I will offer new books and classics, dvds and audiobooks, and any other worthy items of the 18th century that relate to the "wilderness war."
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales 2 volume boxed set
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales 2 volume boxed set
The definitive edition of Cooper’s great epic of the American frontier, now in a dramatic boxed set. Here, presented in their order of composition and in the most authoritative texts available, are all five classic novels: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
Leatherstocking, or Natty Bumppo, first appears in The Pioneers as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. The Last of the Mohicans looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash a wave of terror through the English settlements. The Prairie takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice.
American readers couldn’t get enough of the Leatherstocking saga and, fourteen years after he published The Prairie, Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea. During the Seven Years’ War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty brings the daughter of a British sergeant to her father’s station on the Great Lakes, where the French and their Indian allies are plotting a treacherous ambush—and, for the first time, Natty falls in love. The Deerslayer brings the saga full circle and follows the young Leatherstocking on his first warpath. Honorable to friend and foe alike, stoic under torture, and cool under fire, Natty emerges as Cooper’s noblest figure of the American frontier.
Blake Nevius (1916–1994), volume editor, was professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the author of numerous studies of American writers, including Cooper, Edith Wharton, and Sinclair Lewis.
Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.