About the Author

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).

Alan Taylor is Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the author of many acclaimed books on early America, including the Pulitzer P rize-winning William Cooper's Town- Power and Persuasion on the Early American Frontier andAmerican Revolutions- A Continental History, 1750-1804.