[200 years ago Wednesday, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published. That’s one of many Cooper novels with a lot to tell us about his and our America, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Cooper novels. Leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite CooperStudying book!]
How Cooper’s third and fourth novels exemplify my categories of historical and period fiction respectively.
A long time ago on this blog (seriously, 2012 feels more or less made-up at this point, but it happened and AmericanStudier was there), I started a weeklong series on historical novels with this post in which I delineated two different categories within the genre: period fiction, which is more interested in telling engaging stories that happen to be set in the past than in exploring history itself as a central focus or subject; and historical fiction, which is genuinely interested in doing the latter. That’s the main gist of the distinction, but check out that post for a bit more if you would, and then come on back for an application of the two types to Cooper.
Welcome back! Since period fiction is a bit more straightforward of a category, I’ll start with Cooper’s fourth novel, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1824), which I believe illustrates that subgenre. It’s not that The Pilot doesn’t portray historical figures and events—indeed, its mysterious title character and protagonist is a fictional version of none other than John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary War naval hero. Nor am I suggesting that it doesn’t get plenty of details right—although he was born after the Revolution, Cooper spent four teenage years (1806-10) as a U.S. Navy merchant sailor and knew that world very well. But I would nonetheless argue that The Pilot is far more consistently and centrally interested in the interpersonal intrigues between its characters—many of them romantic and/or familial, others professional rivalries between sailors and ship captains alike—than it is in the naval history of the Revolution or similar subjects. Which is totally fine (I really don’t intend these categories as necessarily hierarchical, even though I do personally prefer historical fiction), but does make The Pilot a good example of period fiction.
And then there’s Cooper’s third novel, The Pioneers; or, the Sources of the Susquehanna (1823). I haven’t read every Cooper book (I was going to add “yet,” but I don’t know that I’ll ever get to all of them), but of the ones I have, The Pioneers is by far my favorite. Partly that’s because it’s the first (in publication order, not eventual chronology) of the five novels that would become known collectively as the Leatherstocking Tales, and like so many American readers then and since, I am a sucker for their main character Natty Bumppo (on whom more tomorrow). But mostly it’s because The Pioneers is truly, deeply interested in history, not just in terms of particular kinds of complex historical events (specifically the founding and development of a pioneer town, one very much like the one founded by Cooper’s own father), but also and especially in terms of themes like continuity and change over time. Themes that were deeply resonant in Cooper’s own Early Republic period, and that remain hugely important for how we think about American history today—making this historical novel well worth our time in 2026.
Next CooperStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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