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    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder"
    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder"
    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder"
    Ebook49 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535830621
    A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper's "Pathfinder" - Gale

      12

      The Pathfinder; or, the Inland Sea

      James Fenimore Cooper

      1840

      Introduction

      James Fenimore Cooper, who published his first book in 1820, is generally regarded as the first significant American novelist. His novel The Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea, was published in 1840, the fourth in a series of five novels called the Leatherstocking Tales. Leatherstocking is one of the various names given to the recurring main character in these novels, the frontiersman Nathaniel Natty Bumppo. The novels, taken together, form a saga of Natty Bumppo's life, but they were not written in chronological order. For example, The Prairie, published in 1827, narrates the events surrounding Natty's old age and death, while The Deerslayer (another of Natty's names), published in 1841, tells the story of his youth. The events of The Pathfinder, which is set in the year 1756, take place in Natty's middle age, so although it was the fourth published book in the series, it is the third in the chronological sequence of Natty's life. Thus, readers wishing to approach the novels in that order would start with The Deerslayer, followed by The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie.

      The Pathfinder and the other Leatherstocking novels remain of interest because of their portrait of frontier life in early America. From a twenty-first-century standpoint, the frontier is usually thought of as the Old West, encompassing, for example, the Great Plains, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and the desert Southwest. In the mid-1700s, though, the American colonies were perched along the Atlantic seaboard, and a largely unsettled region such as western and upper New York would have been regarded as the frontier.

      This is the setting in which Natty Bumppo exercises his skills as a frontiersman, scout, and guide. For his earliest readers, Cooper was their chief source of information about the forests, lakes, rivers, and Indian tribes of the frontier. A central theme that unites the Leatherstocking Tales is the conflict between the forces of civilization and those of the wilderness. For Natty, the frontier is God's wilderness, something that needs to be preserved; conflict arises with those who would want to tame and conquer the wilderness or who fail to respect it. In this way, the novels remain important as much for their social views as for their literary value. Cooper, through his fiction, captured some of the fundamental impulses that directed and shaped the American character in its early decades. His work had a profound impact on American popular culture; in a very real sense, such figures as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim, and the Lone Ranger and his Indian sidekick, Tonto, are descendants of Natty Bumppo and his Indian companions.

      Author Biography

      Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, one of thirteen children. His father, William, was a storekeeper, but he acquired wealth as a land speculator and frontier developer. His mother was heiress Elizabeth Fenimore. William Cooper

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