Originally published in 1967

In this critical survey of the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, George Dekker devotes a good deal of attention to Cooper’s politics. He also explores the assimilation and development of the historical novel as first perfected by Sir Walter Scott. Cooper’s major formal innovations in the field of historical fiction were, like Scott’s, something more than mere experiments: they were made because American social and political developments differed radically from those of Scott’s Europe and so demanded a different formal expression.