The Student Companion to James Fenimore Cooper At the dawn of America's continental empire, James Fenimore Cooper in the early 1800s became the new nation's first major novelist, inaugurating a great period in American literature and bequeathing a number of classic texts including the Leather-Stocking Tales. This to Cooper's writings appeals to high school and college students by outlining Cooper's most frequently assigned novels and establishing their historical backgrounds concerning American Indians and the early United States. Two opening chapters review the author's life and accomplishments, and another offers tips for managing Cooper's style and subject matter. Cooper's breakthrough novel (1821), which features George Washington as a major actor, has a chapter of its own. The second half of the highlights the Leather-Stocking Tales, with one chapter on the overall saga and five chapters devoted to the individual novels in the series: , , and . Altogether this shares the spirit of adventure that made Cooper a pioneer of American Romantic literature and his writings a perennial source for ideas and images of Native America, the frontier, and the early modern USA.