Cooper: The Leather-Stocking Tales

Abstract

No other American writer in this book has Cooper’s assurance about the authorial self, the New World and the reader. We see this assurance in the opening paragraph of The Pioneers (1823), the first of The Leather-Stocking Tales. It amounts to an affirmation of America’s cultural continuity with Britain. In the New World, so the opening paragraph of The Pioneers implies, are ‘beautiful and thriving villages’ and ‘neat and comfortable farms’, of which the Old World itself might be proud. America is independent, but its expectations are reassuringly traditional:

The expedients of the pioneers who first broke ground in the settlement of this country are succeeded by the permanent improvements of the yeoman, who intends to leave his remains to molder under the sod which he tills, or, perhaps, of the son, who born in the land, piously wishes to linger around the grave of his father. Only forty years have passed since this territory was a wilderness.