James Fenimore Cooper: Sea Tales (LOA #54)

“[Both] novels were admired by Joseph Conrad, who declared, ‘Cooper loved the sea and he looked at it with consummate understanding. His descriptions embrace the colors of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters.’ “ — Boston Globe

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) grew up at Otsego Hall, his father’s manorial estate in upstate New York. Educated at Yale, he spent five years at sea, before beginning his literary career at thirty with Precaution (1820), a novel of manners. His second book, The Spy (1821), was an immediate success, and with The Pioneers (1823) he began his series of Leatherstocking Tales. By 1826 when The Last of the Mohicans appeared, his standing as a major novelist was established. After several years of writing nonfiction, he returned to fiction—and to Leatherstocking—with The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).

Volume editors are Kay Seymour House, editor-in-chief of the State University of New York James Fenimore Cooper edition, and Thomas Philbrick, professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh.