Two clothbound, slipcased volumes | 2,400 pages
The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper’s great saga of the American frontier, narrate the conflict of nations (Indian, English, French, and American) amid the dense woods, desolate prairies, and transcendent landscapes of the New World. Leatherstocking, or Natty Bumppo, first appears in The Pioneers as an aged hunter living on the fringe of a New York settlement at the end of the eighteenth century. 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 attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash a wave of terror. The Prairie takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains.
American readers couldn’t get enough of the Leatherstocking saga and Cooper brought him back in The Pathfinder. During the Seven Years’ War, just after the events narrated in The Last of the Mohicans, Natty heads for a British outpost 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, Natty emerges as Cooper’s noblest figure of the American frontier.
Each volume contains authoritative and unabridged texts, helpful notes, and a detailed and informative chronology of the writer’s life.
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Richard Henry Dana Jr.:
Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages
Clothbound, slipcased edition • 924 pages
In three sea-going travel narratives, Richard Henry Dana Jr. spans 25 years of maritime history. Two Years Before the Mast vividly portrays the daily routines and hardships of life at sea, the capriciousness and brutality of merchant ship captains and officers, and the beauty and danger of the southern oceans in winter. To Cuba and Back is an entertaining and enthusiastic account of a Caribbean trip, during which Dana toured Havana and a sugar plantation, attended a bullfight, and investigated the impact on Cuban society of slavery and autocratic Spanish rule. Journal of a Voyage Round the World provides fascinating vignettes of frontier life in California, missionary influence in Hawaii, the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War on China—and on to Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Europe.
