A thrilling novel of seafaring adventure, romance, and Napoleonic history, from the author of The Leatherstocking Tales.In 1842, James Fenimore Cooper returned to transatlantic themes with a thrilling historical novel set in the Mediterranean Sea, weaving together a characteristically exciting narrative of naval pursuit with a story of lovers separated by religious differences. As the novel unfolds, warships under the command of the recent...

Cooper's The Chainbearer presents an exciting narrative that interrogates issues of what it means to own land. The novel examines the claims of ownership of wilderness land among Native Americans, New England squatters, and the old New York families with legal deeds.In 1845 and 1846, James Fenimore Cooper published The Littlepage Manuscripts, a trilogy reflecting on the anti-rent movement among small farmers leasi...

An exciting adventure tale of sealers caught in the Antarctic ice in the early nineteenth century and forced to winter over in extreme conditions.The Sea Lions (1849) is the twelfth and last of Cooper's sea novels, a genre he largely invented. Drawing upon memories from nearly three decades earlier of his own ventures in whaling and his reviews of accounts of exploring and hunting in cold seas, Cooper fashioned an exciting tale of two small vessels capturi...

An exciting Revolutionary War tale of double agents and counterespionage in New York State in 1780.A year after his imitative first novel Precaution (1820) enjoyed only modest success, James Fenimore Cooper penned The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, a Revolutionary War narrative initiating the American historical romance, a novel and a genre that quickly put to rest the British critic Sydney Smith's 1820 quip, "In the four corners of the globe,...

A novel of early eighteenth-century Venice that Cooper called "in spirit, the most American book I ever wrote."The Bravo (1831) takes place in early eighteenth-century Venice, when the "Serene Republic" had lost much of its glory, leaving its oligarchs struggling to hold on to their family wealth by manipulating the government and people through secret councils and a figure-head doge. In 1844, Cooper called it "in spirit, the most American book I ever wrot...